India needs to curb overlooking known vulnerabilities: Diwakar Dayal, India & SAARC, Tenable

India’s needs are not different from the rest of the world when it comes to cybersecurity. When you look at the vast majority of breaches that occur, whether they’re in India or globally most of these breaches are caused by overlooking known vulnerabilities. At a very basic level, practising basic cyber hygiene, says Diwakar Dayal, Managing Director, India & SAARC, Tenable, in conversation with Elets News Network (ENN).

Diwakar Dayal

  1. How is Tenable helping organizations to reduce their cyber risk?

Many organizations in India are embarking or are well into their digital transformation journey. While the addition of new technologies makes organizations agile and more competitive they also add scale and complexity to corporate networks. That means rather than having a single network to secure, security teams have thousands of modern and traditional assets and a variety of environments making it challenging to manage and secure.

Unfortunately, antiquated security tools and practices are not adequate for modern business. Organizations must adopt a dynamic approach to cybersecurity – one that’s built for the digital world, its complexities and a shifting threat landscape. Tenable’s Cyber Exposure platform is a perfect example. It’s designed to help organisations secure the full range of modern assets and accurately manage, measure and reduce their risk holistically – providing the visibility and insight needed to prioritize threats and vulnerabilities against business context to thwart attacks.

  1.  Where does India stand in terms of cybersecurity? In your view, what are the weak points?

India’s needs are not different from the rest of the world when it comes to cybersecurity. When you look at the vast majority of breaches that occur, whether they’re in India or globally most of these breaches are caused by overlooking known vulnerabilities. At a very basic level, practising basic cyber hygiene such as patching systems and using strong authentication can significantly reduce the risk of compromise on critical networks. Doing so will ensure that organisations can identify vulnerabilities and exposures before they can be compromised. This allows organizations to make the necessary corrections to mitigate those weaknesses.

  1. Financial services organizations have become the most attractive targets for cyberattackers. What is your advice in this regard?

Cyberattacks against financial services organisations have become a lucrative criminal enterprise due to the high-value and sensitive data held within these institutions. To add to the complexity, the growing number of IoT devices, public cloud services and ephemeral applications is rapidly expanding the modern attack surface meaning these organisations need to work around the clock to safeguard the sensitive data they’ve been entrusted to protect whilst ensuring continuity of services. Therefore, banks need to build a robust culture of security and accountability of their assets. To achieve this, security teams need a complete and reliable view of the entire modern computing environment so they can continue to innovate and take a proactive rather than a reactive approach to managing the security challenges of today and tomorrow.

  1. Public cloud infrastructure is a top challenge for cybersecurity leaders and a major source of Cyber Exposure. Why is it so?

One of the most transformative changes in the IT industry is the adoption of public cloud services which have afforded organizations enormous speed and agility advantages and has driven the emergence of DevOps practices.

Yet for all of their advantages, cloud computing and DevOps introduce new complexities for security teams, including rapid-fire changes to production environments alongside short-lived and even serverless assets that create security blind spots. This leads to reduced visibility into the infrastructure itself and more often than not, to unmanaged cyber risk. Organizations require both comprehensive security approaches and visibility into assets, vulnerabilities and exposures.

  1. What are your offerings in terms of cloud technology? What makes your products unique?

As a core component of Tenable’s Cyber Exposure platform, Tenable.io uniquely provides the breadth of visibility into cyber risk across highly dynamic cloud environments to help security teams discover, assess and manage cybersecurity risks. Using an advanced asset identification algorithm, Tenable.io provides the most accurate information about dynamic assets and vulnerabilities in everchanging environments.

As a cloud-delivered solution, its intuitive dashboard visualizations, comprehensive risk-based prioritization, and seamless integration with third-party solutions help security teams maximize efficiency and scale for greater productivity. Also, Tenable.io’s elastic asset licensing model based on assets instead of IP addresses, enables organizations to accurately identify, track and license the assets in their environment.

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