Illumio’s Trevor Dearing explains the critical need for a Zero Trust Approach in times of AI

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Trevor Dearing, director of Critical Infrastructure Solutions at Illumio, explains the need for a ‘Zero Trust’ model in the face of mass adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), rising ransomware and phishing attacks, and migrating storage systems.

Q: What are the enterprise security challenges in the market that Illumio is focused on solving?

We really focus on helping organisations to maintain services while they’re under attack. And this is really reflective of a shift in thinking within cybersecurity to move away from trying to stop every and all attacks and focus on surviving an attack.

For the last 25 years, people have been investing in security technologies and we’re still suffering those attacks. So, there’s a definite shift in thinking in the way that people address the problems of focusing on resilience, really, rather than just purely the security aspect.

Q: What did you showcase at GITEX GLOBAL 2023?

GITEX GLOBAL has always been a big a big event. I’ve been personally coming here for 30 years and it’s where everything happens within this region. What we have shown and talked about is the ability to do things like assess the risk in businesses to be able to protect against ransomware attacks and also how to very quickly and easily secure your business if there is an attack.

Q: How do you help enterprises prevent or survive ransomware attacks?

What we do is that we make sure that if there is an attack that it is contained. Imagine that a burglar breaks into a property and then they can’t get out of the room that they’ve broken into.

That becomes very important for a lot of our customers, because what happens is you get maybe a phishing attack and the unsuspecting recipient of that may hit the button and it goes and it detonates. What we’ll do is, we’ll stop that blast radius from getting at the most critical assets within the organisation.

Q: How would you define the concept of zero trust and why do you place yourself as a specialist in zero trust?

Zero trust is really a different way of thinking. It’s not a technology. It has been hijacked by vendors for many years but it’s really about doing the fundamentals well.

It’s about things like identifying where the risk is. It’s very much a shift from trying to put all your security into the network and focus on protecting individual assets and resources. The concept of ‘Zero Trust’ is that the network can’t be trusted. What we have to do is we have to protect each of the individual devices.

If you think about something as simple as a hospital where there’s lots of patients and they’re using the coffee shop and they’re doing all those sorts of things on the network, you really don’t want to be there. You want to keep all these networks very separate from the operating rooms or the intensive care. It’s that type of that type of zero trust approach that gives you that protection.

Q: How do you convince your clients to start thinking about Zero Trust?

Well, it’s several ways. A lot of the regulators are forcing people to think that way. Whether they call it zero trust or not is a different thing. But you look at the local cyber resiliency regulations that came into place a few years ago. It guides you down that route, taking a risk-based approach.

That’s the fundamental thing, is look at the risks that you’re facing and protect your most important critical assets first.

Q: Do you have a hard time convincing people of the risks or is it the other way around?

I think it’s becoming more like they know the risks in the market and they’re coming to Illumio for a solution.

Maybe four years ago, people couldn’t quite get their head around the idea. But I think what we’ve seen is with the growth in ransomware attacks and especially now with AI-generated attacks that your security approach has to be much stronger. So, everyone we know, everyone we talk to, they go, yes, I understand exactly what that does.

Q: How can you help enterprises deal with this new area of risk that comes with mass adoption of AI?

I think there’s two aspects to security. There’s protecting AI from poisoning all the things. It’s a bit like, you know, that a bad person could come along and teach your child to swear and you’re trying to avoid that. So that’s one thing. You have to control the learning, what the AI is learning.

The other side is where ransomware gangs are using AI to generate a malware that can get around your existing technology. And again, that comes back to doing the basics well, the basic hygiene.

If you can restrict the access from one system to another, then it has a much more difficult time of learning where all the vulnerabilities are. If you can identify vulnerabilities and risk and protect them again, you’re stopping AI from learning how to attack it. So yeah, so really the answer isn’t more AI, the answer to doing the fundamentals well.

Q: Could you tell us something about the challenges that enterprises face when it comes to cyber security in the MENA region?

A lot of the challenges are very international now. You have ransomware gangs that can operate anywhere. But I think one of the interesting things specifically for this region has been, over time the rate of adoption of technology.

When I first came here, no one could understand why you would want security, because there was very little crime. I think what’s happening here is that the adoption of technologies like cloud is very fast, probably faster than other places, along with the adoption of other technologies. What you have to hence make sure happens is that as you transform your business, you’re transforming your security at the same rate.

And that’s been the lesson that was learned in other regions and that really needs to be adopted now over here.