Today, the rapid advance of information technologies has created unprecedented levels of development in various organizations associated with greater economic value. In some way, this results from the data made available by all of us daily and which feed the systems and which involve the movement of huge volumes of data (information). All of this brings great additional risks and, therefore, themes such as cybersecurity and privacy have become part of organizations in recent years. But how do organizations deal with the importance of both? What are the priorities for cybersecurity and privacy? What does active prevention mean?
It was precisely on these very current topics that Altice Labs and V21 – Technology Incubation Center of Viseu, got together to share on the 1st of July 2020, the 6th Moving Forward webinar on “Active Prevention in Cybersecurity and Privacy”. The session was attended by Keynote Speaker José Alegria, Chief Security Officer and Director of Cybersecurity and Privacy at Altice Portugal and a panel with speakers Rui Shantilal, CEO of Integrity, Rui Silva, Professor in Cybersecurity at the Polytechnic Institute of Beja and creator of the platform HARPOON and Tiago Mendo, CTO of Probely, moderated by João Barreto, CyberSecurity Advisor at ITCenter, former VP of Strategic Marketing at S21sec, former Founder and Partner of SysValue.
José Alegria started the session by explaining the pillars of Altice Portugal’s cybersecurity doctrine and its active prevention strategies. The model is based on Active Governance (central pillar), Active Prevention, Active Protection (cyber resilience) and Active Detection and Response. In addition to Active Governance, the most critical pillar is Active Prevention, duly supported by a robust set of metrics, which best defines an organization’s maturity level in terms of cybersecurity. Thus, it aims to reduce the vulnerabilities to which an organization is exposed as much as possible. According to José Alegria, it is necessary to “Monitor, Measure and Manage for Continuous Improvement”, including in the cyber awareness component because “we are all necessary parts of Active Prevention”.
This was followed by João Barreto, who introduced the speakers of this discussion panel, in order to understand how three organizations with different scopes contribute to active prevention, such as Integrity, from the Polytechnic Institute of Beja, and Probely.
Rui Shantilal stated that Integrity has become a national and global reference and has a platform that systematizes the performance of persistent intrusion tests in more than 17 countries and how these become important for the security of an organization making it more resilient.
Rui Silva explained how the Harpoon platform came about, and how the Polytechnic Institute of Beja has been working on information security and gaining an increasing role in this area through the development of technological platforms. The Harpoon system promotes active prevention, monitoring the vulnerabilities of an application through a probe installed on the machines, thus being more accurate in detecting security flaws, and therefore offering a more detailed prevention, focusing on all installed programs
For Tiago Mendo, Probely is a component of web security in the development phase, also with the objective of detecting failures through the integration of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that can be integrated into products of organizations. This type of security application is increasingly important, because a large part of the companies have exclusively online exposure.
After the Q&A session, Alcino Lavrador ended this 6th webinar by pointing out that this was a very enriching sharing moment for all those present, and that this theme is becoming increasingly current, especially now with the rapid digital evolution. Any efforts that can be made to tackle this security problem are welcome. We must be prepared so that one day the data can be attacked and this process must be based on metrics for continuous improvement.
This 6th webinar was the last of this first cycle. We remind you that you can review all the last five Moving Forward Webinars that have already taken place:
5G Impacts on Society and Economy
What challenges after the COVID-19 pandemic?
Health and Technology in a Happy & Smart City
Practical Paths to Artificial Intelligence
Entrepreneurship and Investment