While methods such as generative user awareness remain among the most efficient and low-cost mechanisms for preventing cybersecurity incidents, they are becoming less effective as attacks become more sophisticated.
Image used for representational purpose only. Photograph: Pixabay.com
The number of cybersecurity incidents has surged five-fold over the last year and could increase over 20-fold in the coming year due to advancements in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), said Aman Raheja, global chief information security officer (CISO), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
“The pace of change in cybersecurity is now more prominent than the change itself. Ransomware is gaining new dimensions. Threats from state actors due to shifting geopolitical scenarios will continue to occur going ahead,” Raheja said.
Key Points
- Cybersecurity incidents have surged five‑fold and may rise 20‑fold due to Generative AI (GenAI).
- Hackers exploit GenAI to scale phishing, ransomware, and create sophisticated malware targeting critical sectors.
- HPE’s CISO stresses multi‑layered defenses, behavior‑based detection, and customized threat modeling for industries like banking, finance, healthcare, and defence.
The arrival of GenAI has made exploiting technology more accessible to hackers, allowing them to send emails and phishing messages on a much larger scale to millions of users in a much shorter timeframe, he said.
These attackers, Raheja said, are now also using GenAI to instruct large language models to generate new, more sophisticated code and complex programs to exploit vulnerabilities in organisations’ networks.
“Organisations such as HPE have adapted to this burgeoning problem, which cannot be solved just by deploying additional human resources. Though companies have begun responding to the new threats posed by GenAI, they will need to be more aggressive and accurate to address them,” Raheja said.
Ensure ample threat modelling
While methods such as generative user awareness remain among the most efficient and low-cost mechanisms for preventing cybersecurity incidents, they are becoming less effective as attacks become more sophisticated, he said.
The second method is to ensure ample threat modelling for all such possible incidents, Raheja said.
“All we are saying to the users is that if they understand the workflow of how some transactions work, how users operate, whether it is on the network, desktop or an application. We also have to ensure that the right technical controls are in place in a multi-level step for the right protections,” he said.
What companies need to do
“Apart from ensuring rules-based protection mechanisms, companies will also need to ensure that the protective systems are trained on behaviour-based mechanisms so that the tools are updated with the latest trends and usage patterns,” Raheja said.
“Every company needs to customise the detections based on their own environment. That is where it takes time and investment to understand these detections and then feed that back into the production strategy. Once companies have this complete cycle, things will continue to get better,” he said.
Raheja, who oversees the cybersecurity strategy and its implementation across HPE’s worldwide operations, also said that the cycle of which industries face the most cybersecurity incidents keeps repeating but always comes back to the critical sectors of banking, finance, healthcare, and defence.
