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When it comes to cyber threats, one can’t always predict when one will occur. But one can prepare! The American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) hosted a virtual conference with 20 speakers on May 21st at the Cybersecurity Summit. The topic of cybersecurity with growing incidents of ransomware, malware, cyberwarfare and hacking raises a lot of eyebrows in our lives at personal as well as organizational levels and hence the underlying theme of the summit was “Because everyone needs to be secure.”
The summit was co-chaired and kicked off by ASEI National President Piyush Malik who is serving as Chief Digital & Transformation Officer at Veridic solutions and Bhawna Singh, a Senior Vice President of Engineering at Cybersecurity vendor Okta and a recent ASEI Engineer of the Year awardee. Leading voices representing the cybersecurity industry – from software vendors to risk management consultants to cyber industry innovators to emerging technology startups to government and company board representatives were present and joined by a wide range of experts from all walks of the cybersecurity and technology industry.
ASEI Co-Chairs started the discussion by setting the context, sharing the what and why of cybersecurity and the threat landscape.
As part of the digital agenda and with increasing adoption of cloud, DevOps and Agile becoming mainstream as a result of embracing microservices and containerization, over 55% of organizations release software products weekly. This naturally causes strain if security principles are not adopted upfront by developers.
In his keynote, titled “Enabling Engineers to Build a Secure Future”, Ankur Shah from Palo Alto Networks talked about Security supply chains being the new targets by malicious actors and gave tips to the engineers in the community to “move fast, build great things and make sure everything is secure”. One small vulnerability in infrastructure-as-code at the repository level can lead to 1000’s of problems and hence the cost to remedy rises exponentially downstream. Citing AWS CTO Werner Vogels, he stressed on security being a shared responsibility and presented a solution of breaking silos by prescribing a DevSecOps approach and leveraging automation.
Moderated by Invigrid CEO Yogita Parulekar , the first panel discussion focussed on the daunting Talent gap in the growing cyber security space with panelists Chirag Shah from Model N, Nataraj. Nagaratnam CTO IBM Security & Laxmish Bhat- President iZen. With 80% of recent security breaches attributed to skills gap with 38% losing over a $1Million each, this panel assumed a pivotal role in the summit. Each of the speakers brought forward unique personal perspectives on the topic while sharing how their respective companies is helping. eg IBM has introduced Cybersecurity as part of the award winning public-private P-Tech program for high schoolers and iZen has come up with an intelligent edtech solution accelerating cybersecurity knowledge for universities and organizations alike with or without internet access
Aastha Verma, former President at ASEI Washington DC chapter, spoke next about CISA and its initiatives in ethical hacking to protect the homeland. As Department of homeland security’s (DHS) CISA Branch Chief for Vulnerabilities, she was able to share a lot of resources to help the audience understand how the government and public can work hand in hand to curb the cyber risks. To cite a couple, she shared “Shields up” and “Presidents Cup” initiatives which are all available to the population via CISA website
The Women in Cybersecurity Panel was led by Chitra Dharmarajan with panelists Rupa Mittapalli from IBM, Upasna Saluja from AT&T and Anusha Vaidhyanathan from Zscalar. The amazing life /career transformation stories of these women leaders and how they got into the industry and what keeps them going in applying scientific method to cyber risk management and protection from cyberthreats inspired us all. A number of tips for pivoting into cybersecurity were shared. We also learned about building a career in this industry – from a student to developer to security engineer to a cyber product manager and ultimately a cybersecurity leader.
Jyothsna Lekkala from Zoom then talked about Software Supply Chain Security and how it has evolved from physical to software more so since the 9/11 attacks. Was shocked to learn that within 3 years from now, over 50% organizations’ software supply chains are likely to be targeted.
The power packed Geopolitical panel moderated by Cybersecurity for PM Author Niharika Srivastav -addressed the role of cybersecurity in the current geopolitical instability caused by threats from Russia-Ukraine war as well as increasing use of rouge-nation backed deliberate sabotage and highly sophisticated cyberwar attacks.
The panelists Rita Archrekar – Board director at ICICI bank, Anshu Gupta – CISO at Silicon Valley based SVCI and Vishal Chawla, a senior partner at PWC brought in their rich and specialized point of view from their observations and experiences. The theme of building resiliency into our systems came up repeatedly. Companies need an ability of their systems to detect, contain and eradicate these external as well as insider threats & cyberattacks. To get away from FUD and misinformation being propagated by cyber vendors, a number of things need to happen: viz Security hygiene is a must have practice in organizations. Scanning backups for indications of compromise. Holistic strategy against ransomware and other threats etc.
