Shams Hasan, Infrastructure Solutions Manager at Dell. Pic: Abdul Basit / The Peninsula
In the rapidly changing IT industry and advancement in digital technology, the nature and characteristics of cybercrimes and threat perception is also changing with the same pace or even faster, and the efforts made to combat are not adequate, noted an industry expert.
In this fast changing world and dynamic environment the only way to combat the cybercrimes is to know more and more about the industry and innovation. “The nature of digital world is changing very fast, and it has changed significantly over the last couple of decades. But we are slow enough to recognise yesterday’s digital world, let alone today’s world,” Shams Hasan, Infrastructure Solutions Manager at Dell told The Peninsula.
Hasan, who is also an expert on artificial intelligence (AI) and automated cybercrimes, explained it with a hypothetical example. He added: “Just imagine a situation where a kid playing in a park with his toy — a robot puppy AI-equipped. What if it gets hacked and takes the child out of the field.”
He said that there instances of growing number of incidence when AI algorithms have carried out fishing attacks. They are also capable of carrying out deep fake image or video-based hacks and putting out voices on people’s face and compromising security.
Providing another instance of fast changing world and the magnitude of the threat it may pose to the society, he cited the example of China which recently launched the world’s first news anchor which is driven by AI, and questioned.
“What if that AI-based news anchor is compromised and broadcasts highly sensitive disinformation or fake news with catastrophic consequences?”
“In every conference on cyber security that I attended, most experts say that we are running behind. If that is true then are we ready for the situation, for the fact it is going to accelerate so rapidly in coming days? It is one of the major concerns for the companies as well as individuals to think about,” he added.
“Then there is a question: How do we prepare for this? So we need to learn more and more with the same pace, but unfortunately it is not happening.”
Commenting about the unpreparedness and the extent of the vulnerability of people to any types of cybercrime, Hasan noted that nearly 75 percent of the people attending a forum on the subject are not aware about ‘dark web’, which constitute 96 percent of the Internet where anonymous people can act unregulated, where most of the cybercrime economy exist and thrive.
“The digital economy is the stuff that everybody apparently saying that we need to be careful about, but everybody lives there. So knowing more is the first piece of advice. Then we need to defend faster in terms of what we need to do. It requires building a right ecosystem, the way we think about it. Organisations today still thinking security as an in-house job only. There has to be collaboration,” he said.
He reiterated that investment in security over the last couple of years have doubled, but the number of attacks and the number successful attacks both have quadrupled during the period, in terms of the amount of loss in dollar terms. “One single company has lost nearly $350m due to compromise through cyber attack. Isn’t it a mind boggling figure?,” he wondered.
