2023 was undoubtedly a breakthrough year for generative artificial intelligence technology, marking the official integration of AI into households. To delve deeper into the discussion on cyber threats and multiple theft cases, we are joined by Mr. Dhananjay Ganjoo, Managing Director for India & SAARC at F5. Tune in to learn more about how AI is impacting cybersecurity and the emerging risks in this domain.
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This is a special episode brought to you by F5 2023 was undoubtedly a breakthrough year for generative AI it was the year that AI officially became a household name however with continuous advancements in technology the dangers uh linked to data breaches and cyber threats are escalating hi I’m deep Ahuja
A head content at HG smartcast and I’m also your host on Minch etra today we are discussing cyber security and cyber threat these two issues cannot be discussed separately they have to be addressed together over the past decade we have witnessed multiple cases of theft Financial losses data breaches in
2022 alone India witnessed 1.39 million cyber security incidents isn’t that shocking to discuss this further address this issue further we have with us Mr dhanjay ganju managing director for India and Sark at F5 veteran in the industry danan is responsible for driving f5’s growth strategy in India
And the Sak region he’s responsible for bringing endtoend Solutions and competitive security offerings together all this so that F5 becomes a preferred choice for customers to create secure and operate adaptive applications um hi danan welcome to teetra how are you today hi dpti I’m doing well thank you for having me here
It’s it’s a pleasure to start with Dan I want to ask you what are some of the most common cyber security threats and how can Enterprises Safeguard themselves from these kind of threats so DPI Let’s uh first try to understand what are we trying to protect
Before we we decide or before we discuss what are the most common uh cyber threats there are many there are countless number of cyber threats but right but the essense is um what are we really trying to protect and for that let me give you a very um interesting analogy it’s a very
Simple analogy I’m sure your listeners will enjoy it don’t hold me to you know binding that analogy totally to technology but it’s an analogy that works you’ll not forget it so today morning when you left home um you know you uh got dressed and you stepped out
Of your home you locked your door and you gave it a little tug and you you said oh yeah everything is locked up I can leave my home now right now when a thief God forbid but if a thief were to come um let me ask you a question is
Your Thief interested in your front door no is exactly right um and when you left before you left did you lock up your cash your jewelry inside a locker and you put that inside a cupboard and you lock the cupboard too right yeah because your key assets are your cash and
Jewelry not your front door right and the thief when they want to break down the door they want your key assets which you haven’t left on your Center table yep you’ve locked them up as well so you’ve done like double locking so cyber security works pretty much in a layered
Fashion you lock your front door you lock your key assets such as your cash and jewelry um before you you know leave your home so in the cyber world the the Cyber attackers or the hackers are literally not interested in your front door so what is the front
Door in the cyber world that’s your network they are interested in breaking down the network but they gain nothing out of it there is z zero financial gain for the hacker and let me also explain hackers are not doing it for fun of it hackers are doing to gain some um you
Know Financial outcome out of that and whatever hackers do also costs them money it costs compute they have to you know get compute from various places or at least hack into someone else’s computer and use that compute they pay for bandwidth charges um they do exactly whatever we do they pay exactly whatever
We pay it’s just that they multiply it so many times over that the cost of an attack for an hacker has to be lesser than the financial gain because if the cost of the attacker is equal to the financial gain there is nothing in it for the hacker right right so exactly so
What is more um desirable for a hacker to come to break down the front door or get your key assets and then we’ll discuss what are the key assets it’s like okay you’ve broken down the network but your key assets are your applications yeah right that’s what the
Hackers are after because they can either steal away personal information and sell that on the do web or they can um you know game the logic of the application like one of the most frequently exploited logic is forgot password yeah right you forget your password and then you have a little so
Often correct and then people use different mechanisms somebody will send you an OTP somebody will ask you to you know enter a few CES that you personally have on you um and to be honest with you I don’t want to scare but all of this can be
Broken right so the hacker is after your application that’s what we want to establish first right um and some of the names of common attacks that you must have heard as well are Ransom whereare um or dos which is denial of service denial of service is like when a massive attack
Comes um in a pipe which is an internet facing application pipe it basically the server that is um on which the is hosted is now busy responding to these massive amount of requests which are coming to the server that’s denial of service because you’re denying somebody else the
Opportunity to log in into the server because you’ve kept the server so busy by yourself right so that’s denial of service that’s very very common I think the number of uh denial of service attacks in India are now massively increasing secondly right our bot right so https traffic is the web
Traffic 80% % of that traffic is machine it’s not human beings correct what we need to determine um is whether anybody who’s coming into our network is it a human being or is it a machine that’s the first question typically that is asked and if it’s a if it’s a human
Being allow the human being and if it’s a machine decide whether it’s a good bot or a bad bot and there are various techniques to determine that so when you allow a human being to come in then you got to figure out whether what is the
Inent of this human being right that’s a second check and again you look through various signals um and decide okay this looks like a human being and then you allow the human being further and when the human being comes in you have to do a third and final check is it deepti is
It who you really say you are is it deepti or is it a synthetic identity and a stolen identity of deepti you look like deepti but you aren’t hence what’s your intention so these are VAR various kind of layered defenses that um organizations build and um the most
Common attacks the one that is becoming extremely popular as a discussion with our customers is apis H and and I’ll give you a quick a very simple example I don’t know do you use um cred or PTM or Google pay yes of course we all do don’t
We yeah yeah and our generation’s going cashless exactly and I’m I’m glad they are um it increases my business uh so have you ever thought that when you installed Ked how does Ked get your bank balance or how does GPA get your bank balance well what happened was CED asked
You only once saying hey will you allow me to go to your bank query your bank and allow your bank to give me your bank balance and you said yes once and that’s it finished so every time all of these things are so intricately weaved into the terms and conditions that we all
Just random oh my God we need to make a payment right now but then we don’t look at these terms and conditions we just say yes yes yes yes yes you know just just out of irritation so what is making this happen how does cred get access to your bank
How does gpay or PTM or phone pay get access to your bank because you’ve allowed it right and what is the technology that is making it happen it’s called API right right application programming interface API so there are the API traffic in the world today is much larger and greater and
Exponentially growing than any other traffic so cyber attackers are you know it’s like API world is like a Honeypot they get attracted to wherever there is more action yeah isn’t it so API is the new flavor of the world for hackers and they have very various techniques that
Hackers can insert themselves and you know build shadow apis um when we go to organizations and ask organizations saying do you know how many apis you have and some of them no most of them don’t and API protection is now or API attacks is now on the rise so to answer
Your question in a very longish way yes um well you you did mention API but then you know companies are also transforming digitally right so um how do you think digital transformation is impacting the overall cyber security in India and also across the world so I
Love stories DP let me tell you another one very interesting one right um this is just to make sure that uh we understand what we are trying to protect so let’s go back 200 years ago right so the in the year 1800 something when companies measured their assets on their
Balance sheet what what were they using as a you know um a yard stick for measurement or putting in they used to um you know count all the buildings that they have they count all the machineries uh how many uh multiple offices physical assets that they have
Across the uh continents right so it was more of the physical assets and then the goods you sold were put on your balance sheet and that made you either a heavyweight or a lightweight that era of the world was measured in in what we call as physical capital that was the
Era of physical capital H then in the mid 1900 you had the ibms and the McKenzie and the HPS of the world introduce and give you business process engineering and compute and we increased the overall efficiency of business and became faster at doing things because of these added
Benefits right that era in the mid90s 1900s was directly proportional to the human intellect that made it happen and hence that era is called human capital right right now in the 21st century what is the key capital of the customer and that’s something that we should think
About the key capital in very simple terms is um we currently we are establishing connection through an application called Zoom uh organizations um they work um using applications so if at any time an application of an organization were to go down the organization collapses and you can look at any industry across the
World today any industry small to big everybody is using applications and if the application would to shut down even before the CEO comes to know the whole Twitter World explodes yeah so I’m I’m I’m assuming that the currency of today is data um that is the currency but your capital is
Your application a capital is my application yeah so it’s it’s it’s like physical capital human capital application capit application capital okay it’s the application which is generating all the data data is a byproduct of the application but yes equally important they say data is the new oil but who is
Generating that right it’s the application which is generating all that data once you’ve captured it right right right right so we are living in the world of application capital and hence what we have done is we have exposed ourselves to the internet because that’s the only way to do business today
Or one of the most important ways of doing business today is to keep your shop open 24 by7 and when you expose your assets to the internet you expose yourself to multiple threats um and there is a a long list of threats um that we can go over but let
Me give you another interesting um you know thought process for for your listeners one is how much money do we spend out of our budget to protect our application ations versus how much money do we spend to protect a front door and where are the hackers going so
It’s it’s a bit of a um uh you know crazy situation right now when we look look at the budget spans of organizations 80% of the budget is spent on infrastructure right building the network building all the pipes connecting the pipes to the internet and
About 20% um is is spent on other stuff now 80% the attackers are coming to your application but only 20% of the budget is left to safeguard your application so the message to the Learners to the listeners are listen it’s important to take a balance of your budget and pay
Equal attention to the applications which are your life um today uh in today’s uh application economy and then balance that out not spend everything out only on your front door keep something for the locker in which you want to keep your you know Family Jewels right absolutely if if you want me to
Continue there could be uh things like um automated attacks uh advanced persistent threats ransomware fishing deep fakes that you’ve been listening all these to come to that next yes absolutely yeah uh so danan you mentioned uh deep fakes and that brings me to the topic of generative AI uh
Generative a is evolving at a break neck speed uh it is something that has become a household name in a matter of of just one year um how is AI affecting cyber security and what are some of the emerging risks uh you know in this domain so let me answer the affecting
Part first um it is it is AI is both good and bad um the bad part of AI is um now ai tools are available uh AI tool could be very simply called a botn net which is available so you don’t have to be an hacker or an expert coder you can
Just go to the dark web pick up an AI tool or a bot for a few dollars um and then start launching an attack you could even buy username passwords um you know that are available um on the dark net and start launching an attack so you
Don’t really have to be an expert hacker it’s all there now the flip side to AI is we can also use AI to protect companies so yeah I’ll give you a very simple example um one of the simplest example is um zero day attacks has no signature so we don’t know how to
Protect them think of it like how we had uh the U the covid where we did not not have any vaccine on the zero day but over a period of time a vaccine was developed so in in the in the internet cyber security World once we know the
Signature of the attack we can protect other assets and other properties in other geographies so we can quickly determine that and and the engine that quickly determines that is an AI engine it has automatically without human intervention learned that there was a new attack for which there was no
Signature in the database and hence called zero day and hence build um you know uh protection against that for other assets which haven’t been attacked just yet so we were ahead of the attackers for geographies that they haven’t um you know attacked or assets that they haven’t attacked and we can
Tell all our customers were connected to us saying here is what we’ve heard so that’s just one of the deployments for um AI in terms of number of attacks there can be several automated attacks like I talked about Advanced persistence threats which are prolonged attacks on a particular asset of a customer or
Multiple assets of a customer um and these are all automated there is no human being doing it um it’s just like you switch on a machine and the Machine is actually attacking you right yeah and then fishing attacks that you’ve heard of deep fakes celebrities are getting
Targeted um those can be you know um exploited by cyber criminals impersonating individuals and sending out messages that shouldn’t be sent out in the first place yeah um then there is Insider threats so not just outside uh unbeknown to themselves the the machine of an inside person is already infected
And hence they’re already inside the network um through various sources by downloading free stuff which has got a virus attached to it so you have to be very careful what you click what you download um and everything that you see free out there is not necessarily safe
That’s the message I have for your listeners uh but you know India is very different from other countries right it’s diverse it has small businesses large businesses Enterprises the business landscape is as varied as can be um so how does F5 cater to you know specific needs of different kinds of
Businesses oh that’s that’s a uh very good question it boils down to uh two things one is efficacy of the solution that F5 has and the format in which it can be consumed um in the world that we used to live in in the past just recent past
Everything was inside the data center and um our kind of uh appliances were being used inside the data center of a client like it was a hardware big box that was sitting right next to the application and protecting the biggest asset that you have which is your application but as customers digitally
Transformed they mve to the cloud and so did we so we converted our boxes into a piece of code and we followed the application around so today um without uh actually um uh anything uh lesser in terms of the code in terms of feature and functionality so whatever feature
And functionalities a customer used to get out of an appliance the same is available um in a code that can follow the application wherever the application is going either on private cloud or on public Cloud uh or different data centers that are available so we can
Follow them as a piece of code the good part is the Effy is the same syntax is the same no relearning no retraining everything’s cool um the other thing that has happened in the world is they said I don’t want to buy such a big technology because I’m only going by the
Time I completely use this technology um it will be three years so we we developed what is called a uh as a service model so today I only want to protect one asset I don’t have to buy a big box that can protect thousands of assets so so okay fine you can protect
That big Bo the the big asset that have by what in the technical language it’s called you know dubdub duub do something do something is called the URL so we can now filter down to a single URL that you want to protect or thousands of URL that
A company wants to protect so in a as a service model you pay only for that much you’re consuming so now F5 is able to offer its platform in different consumption models making it simpler for um the SMB or even very small organizations to consume technology which is number one
In terms of application protection and not having to buy or invest a lot of money um there’s one important point I want to make uh for especially large organizations sure security is not about a product when we do cyber security is never about a product now I can give you
A couple of examples um um one of the examples that I usually give is everybody has access to a canvas a paint and a paintbrush but not everybody is an artist similarly if I have access to a great technology like protecting cyber threats from cyber criminals unless and
Until there are people who know how to deploy and effectively use that technology having the technology is not enough not good enough right so I I’ll give you two examples um one was a government entity um where they were under a massive dos attack um denial of
Service to it it servers and we onboarded them um F5 can onboard it’s a free service for our customers we can uh either on board in an emergency or start protecting them in an emergency but the key thing was um the teams behind were very effective they knew how to use the
Tools that we have so having train trained resources that know the tool is very important second was a bank that was under a bot attack and we were doing a PC with that bank and the bank said Hey listen hold on um can you let the
POC continue and move from being only in informed mode to remediate mode which basically means for earlier we were just flagging that you are under a bot attack and not doing anything about it and then they said listen why don’t you remediate and protect us and stop the attack when
We start started stopping the attack the hackers retooled consistently over a period of time yeah and then they gave up because we made them their attack more expensive right for 3 4 days they kept on trying then a week later they came back again and a week later they
Came back again eventually they give up they only give up for a certain period of time before they come back again so it’s like you know we have to be right always they have to be right once kind of a scenario thank you so much tanay for such an informative discussion it
Definitely helped me understand cyber security and cyber threats far better any last piece of advice for Enterprises and individuals alike know I I keep telling um anybody I meet if it’s too good to be true it’s definitely uh um you know the other way around so don’t
Believe anything which is too good to be true and if it’s like really unbelievable then it’s unbelievable it’s not happened um just suspect everything I I remember one of my Army friends telling me In God We Trust everything else we suspect we are exactly in the same environment um and just suspect
Everything it should be your your your uh indicator should be just believe it’s not true rather than believing it the other way around don’t click anything don’t download anything don’t take anything free it’s definitely infected so whether you’re an individual or you’re a business owner being attentive
And proactive when it comes to your digital assets can help you secure them from any kind of cyber security threats that are out there uh we hope that this conversation provided you with a lot of clarity and solutions uh to protect your data which is in any
Case your currency these days thank you D it was nice to be here