BizBahrain May-June 2017

Interview | CTM360
security. So that was the big difference
that we are out here in this part of
the world having a 24 x 7 x 365 cyber
security unit with our own technology
reaching out to the world and managing
threats and attacks which could be
residing anywhere in the globe. There are
no other companies like that in this part
of the world.
Why in your opinion are people not ready
to increase their investment in IT security
despite the rising frequency in cyberattacks?
No, that is not so. There is lot of
money moving in to cyber security.
Organisations are investing. The tendency
normally, across the world, and especially
in this part of the world, is to be reactive.
So when the pains happen, people go out
spending money on it, and right now there
is a lot of pain happening and therefore,
investment. In many large organisations
this is even an agenda that is being
discussed at the board level. There may be
areas where their organisations may try
to budget and reduce spend, but cyber and
information security are areas where they
don't really compromise, not anymore.
Cyber security needs to
be considered like the
Intelligence Agency,
Information security is
your Ministry of Defence,
and IT security is the
Ministry of Interior.
What are the most common sources of
cyber-security threats?
Now it has to be understood that any
cyber threat or a cyber attack is made up
of a number of pieces. So when you say…
‘What is the source?’… but yet cant really
pinpoint such a source because it could be
coming from anywhere in the world. What
you can look for is the real motivation
behind the attacks because the source
could be from anywhere and everywhere.
The attacks could be residing anywhere.
In finding the motive behind the
attack, you see what is more visible. In
fact what you really see, is when there is
the money trail - the financial criminals.
What you don't see is the espionage, when
they are there just to listen in and look.
They don't change anything; they don’t
leave any clues so you don't feel their
presence.
What risk does a company run by not
having a dedicated IT governance, risk
and compliance function?
It's a huge risk if you don't do that,
especially for large organisations. You
don't have a ready framework and you will
always be reactive and because of that
you may have issues with the solutions,
and you will end up spending too much in
areas where you didn't even need to do so.
So with the framework what happens is,
to begin with, you understand your own
risk and you are able to rate it and you
are able to know where you really need to
spend the money. You don't do an over kill
in any area. Without the framework it's all
knee jerk reactions, it is chaos.
CTM360 promises ‘Dependable Security
as a Service’ via a secure cloud-based
platform. Can you explain how this
works?
For that the first thing is that you got
to be clear about what we say is cyber
security, because when we provide cyber
security, we are outside the perimeter. We
do not enter the organisation. What we
are saying is that we are not information
security, we are not IT security, or the
police or military. We are the Intelligence
Agency that works outside the borders,
outside the perimeter. When you are
outside the perimeter do you need
somebody who you can reach at any
time who will be there, who has the
ability and the tools to do analysis for
any kind of attack components, which
are residing on the Internet and also is
able to take action on it? And only so,
they should be really capable of even
analysing and taking action on attacks
which nobody even knows as of today.
As and when something comes we ought
to have our research team capable of
identifying those kind of new attacks
and mitigating those attacks. We have
developed the whole team in that sense
that we have all the tiers and that's why
we say it's dependable. Like I said before,
we provide ‘Dependable Security as a
Service’ via a collaborative cloud-based
platform, which enables members to
tackle evolving cyber threats on a realtime
basis.
Tell us about the strategic alliances that
make CTM 360 a complete service.
We have a number of strategic
alliances. Actually we have two different
companies: CTM360 here in Bahrain
and IT Matrix in KSA, which does a lot
of other things, such as working inside
the firewall. We deploy a lot of different
technologies but at CTM360 we only
work in cyber security and offer it as a
subscription service. Our alliances are
with organisations, which are hosts or
cyber threat intelligence providers on
the Internet. There are communities,
which provide a collaborative platform
for different type of attacks. We have
alliances across the world in that
sense and have established working
relationships with them which enable
us to tackle targeted attacks out of the
hosted services onto the targets and any
players elsewhere in the world. Over
time, we have formed thousands of such
alliances and partnerships because we
need to know every host anywhere and
wherever we see something residing on
their services.
We are the Intelligence
Agency that works
outside the borders,
outside the perimeter.
How can a company predict a cyberattack
and take action before it happens?
Is there any way to know before it
happens?
Cyber-attacks have a number of
pieces. It starts with reconnaissance,
and then weaponization and delivery
and so on till they actually get into your
organisation, which may take a year or
one and half years. When people start
doing this, there is a complete ecosystem
there. Somebody may be collecting a
lot of information across organisations
and selling it to entities with unethical
intentions to resell, with this cycle being
repeated consistently. When something
like that is happening, if we are able
to identify it and make it difficult for
people to go up this Kill chain, then we
can neutralize an attack even without
knowing what it really is for in the very
early stage.
For example, somebody registers
a domain name that looks like an
24 May-June 2017