Lucas Ledwaba, CEO at Phakamo Tech.
The rush to enable people to work from home during the initial lockdown ushered in an era of hyper digitalisation. For many it created security challenges that initially went unchecked while they focused on health, safety and business continuity challenges. Hackers took advantage of the situation and the result is that we now have two pandemics running parallel: the global COVID-19 pandemic and a fifth-generation cyber security pandemic.
However, many organisations are hampered by their continued reliance on second and third generation security, which are characterised by many disparate, unintegrated point security solutions. At the very least, organisations typically have firewall, anti-virus and endpoint security software, usually from a wide range of vendors. Some have on-premises SIEM solutions that often exacerbates the shortage of skills necessary to salvage some form of security capability.
The result is that it’s difficult to integrate the entire security environment and that makes it less effective. It is labour intensive, which is slow and prone to errors, while generally limiting them to detection only rather than also being able to respond quickly and have a single pane of glass into their secured digital landscape.
Hackers quickly figured this out and took advantage of home workers additionally being disconnected from their IT security staff during lockdown. The frequency of phishing attacks related to health and safety around the health pandemic rose sharply. They targeted the age-old security weakness: human emotion. But they had a slew of new weapons in their arsenals.
Fifth generation cyber attacks are what the World Economic Forum calls weapons-grade hacking. It’s when hackers automate their attacks, so they are faster, more lethal and more efficient at exploiting weakness. Businesses have to improve their capa ..
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