Displaying items by tag: Chaim Mazal

GUEST OPINION: As the world focuses on the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Australian organisations must brace themselves for a different kind of competition – one that takes place in the cyber arena. These games provide a prime target for cybercriminals and nation-state actors alike, aiming to exploit the massive global attention and the surge in digital interactions during the event.

GUEST OPINION by Chaim Mazal, Chief Security Officer of Gigamon: Global events are particularly vulnerable due to the rise of geopolitical tensions. Whenever nation-states have a reason to stir the pot, it is essential to take extra precautions. Furthermore, in the last 12 months, only 1 in 3 organisations were able to detect they’d been breached, which is particularly concerning amid the Olympic organising committee’s announcement that cyber threats will increase tenfold this summer.

So where does the risk arise? One area, in particular, is from cloud-based streaming services. In a new era of live TV, enabling viewers to watch on-demand on any device in any location, bringing additional traffic to the organisation’s networks when viewed on a work device or network. However, with any cloud-based service comes risk.

All cloud traffic is automatically encrypted and despite its good intent to keep data safe, research has found that 93% of malware hides behind encrypted traffic. Once a threat actor breaches perimeter security, they hide behind encrypted traffic for weeks or even months making visibility into all network traffic essential. This includes North to South traffic – traffic that flows from outside to inside an organisation and East to West traffic – traffic traversing laterally within the organisation enabling threat actors to hide and locate sensitive data wherever it may live in the network.

An example of how this could play out is through social engineering techniques where a threat actor may leverage a phishing campaign to manipulate a user to click a link to watch highlights from a team or athlete's latest routine/match etc.

In reality, once clicked it opens the door to the user's information and potentially many doors after that, including their company’s network the next time they log into its virtual private network (VPN) or access the company’s Wi-Fi. When it comes down to it, risk is inevitable, however, visibility into all data in motion can be the difference maker between a bad actor walking away with highly sensitive data or being caught in their tracks before successful exfiltration.

Observability specialist Gigamon has appointed Chaim Mazal to the role of CSO, and Sandhya Sagar to the role of chief of staff.