The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has opened up an exponential amount of new technologies which are expanding the threat landscape.
So says Dr Lydia Kostopoulos, SVP emerging tech insights, at KnowBe4.
Dr Kostopoulos will be presenting an international keynote address on “Connecting the puzzle pieces of technological change”, at the ITWeb Security Summit 2022, to be held at the Sandton Convention Centre from 31 May to 2 June.
According to her, countless connected sensors, cloud communications and Internet of things are creating new threats as the digital supply chains grow and become more complex.
In terms of technologies used to combat them, Kostopoulos says it is becoming more complicated because of the different devices and platforms that go into a product or service. “A threat assessment and threat mitigation approach needs to be done for each component for all these emerging digital supply chains.”
What won't change, she says, is the rising attacks on the human layer of cyber defence as social engineering bypasses technical protections and uses the human to gain access or information.
Cyber security skills
Speaking of cyber security skills needed in this era, Kostopoulos says with the rise of quantum computing, we will in the near future have to start thinking about our cyber security architecture in a quantum resistant way.
“As new threats continue to arise the cyber security skills we will need are going to be agility on behalf of the IT teams that manage the risk and a strong human layer defence that includes a robust security culture in an organisation.”
In ending, she says we are in a new moment in our industrial history and this is one that creates exponentially more cyber risk.
“As such cyber security is the enabler of business continuity and the guardian of our intellectual property and the human, whether remote or in the office, is front and centre of this defence.”
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