State of Cyberwarfare and Trends Report – Chris Dobrec, Armis

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome to back detection TV. I'm happy to introduce my next guest to you for this next segment.

His name is Chris. Dobrik. Chris is with armis and we're happy to have him here.

Hey, Chris, welcome. How are you? I'm well Ellen.

Thanks for asking. Hope you're having a great day as well. Yeah, it's all good.

All good. We're having a good time with spite of You know every day we hear about a new breach a new security incident a new, you know, something that's going on in our world and but you got to just power through these things. Chris I guess we should start by giving people a little bit of background on yourself.

And then I think a lot of people know arm. Is there kind of a leader in this, you know, it's iot so security of things if you want to call it that Why don't we start there for those who don't know and and about you? Sure Ellen a great.

Thanks for the opportunity. Just once again for the audience Chris dobrek. I lead our product in Industry Solutions marketing team.

So I've got an interesting role. I I sit at the intersection between the devil organization the sales organization the marketing organization. So I like to say that, you know one foot and what we're building and one foot and how we're bringing it to Market.

Excellent. And for those who aren't familiar with arms, why don't you give them a could a quick kind of you know pitch on that? It's so armist founded in 2015 by a couple gentlemen, you have any debrav and the deer Israel in the focus was really on how to solve some emerging security problems particularly with the sorts of things that we're connecting to the network that you couldn't secure in a traditional Manner and by that I mean by putting security agents on them and and you know, so the problem was all this stuff was connecting to the network, you know that started out as the proverbial internet of things but it's evolved to operational technology medical devices, you know, we're actually quite comprehensive in our solution in terms of being able to provide, you know, deeper visibility into what's going on in an Enterprise Network understand that full context of what a device for an asset is doing how it's behaving what it's talking to see anomalous Behavior with those things and work with the infrastructure to be able to remediate Absolutely, excellent.

And and just before we dive into this report. I want to talk about for people want to get more information about arms. What's the website?

com. com. Thanks Chris.

I appreciate it. All right, let's get down to business. You guys have recently released a new new report or you know this version this year.

Why don't you share with the audience if you don't mind? Yeah sure. We we released our our Global cybersecurity or cyber warfare report, which was interesting.

We interviewed about 6,000 it professionals globally. And in that report we were focusing on key issues around the threat of cyber warfare, you know kind of taking a step back now and you and I have been doing this for a long time and you know from a cyber perspective, we we've seen, you know, things evolved from you know, the early days of stealing data, you know yours and my credit cards out on the dark web so to speak, you know, intellectual property at the little industrial Espionage. So to speak, you know, you wind the clock forward to the pandemic And all of a sudden that shifted to you know out and out extortion which is why we such a saw such a massive rise and ransomware over the course of last two almost three years, but you know with the the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we've actually seen a lot more interesting activity as well, you know, the the types of things that are nation state sponsored or certainly nation-state Affiliated or encouraged, you know are really focusing on things like disruption and Chaos.

com, but we found that about a third of respondents, you know, don't feel they're prepared for cyber warfare right now, which is quite an interesting stat. Yeah. Seeing things we've seen.

Chris is the the willingness for nation-states to acknowledge offensive cyber security Operations not specific we did this or we did that. You know, the NSA hasn't come out and said we took those Bitcoins out of someone's account because they were ill-gotten or what have you. but you know, it's it's much more readily acknowledged.

I think that these are nation-state actions. Right, you know years ago when the crowd strikes of the world were first identifying. you know the the groups within Russia, let's say or within China that were responsible for the Google attack or some of these other kind of You know nation-state kind of things.

It was almost like in hush tones. It was we think they are there's a dotted line, but I I think we've gone away we got we've grown past that I mean clearly and I don't I think another thing is we have a worldwide audience here, right? It's not black and white who's a good guys and bad guys are all the time.

The shades are gray. And I don't care whether we're talking about the us or in Israel and China and Russia or turkey and Iran and Koreans and everyone else. I think every country is recognizing they need to have this capability.

because it's you know cyber War for it was cyber warfare is not Star Wars where you've got, you know. One guy in black and one guy in white. It just doesn't it.

That's not the nature of it anymore. Now without a doubt and it I guess it really comes down to Allen that the stakes are pretty high now, right and and the tools are there, right and they're rapidly evolving. I mean the variance of ransomware that the availability of exploits, you know, the fact that these things, you know are readily available from everything from you know, script kiddies to you know, the folks who are actually nation state sponsored or endorsed right?

And that's why we're saying, you know, probably to your point why we're seeing more soft technology at that level so to speak. Yeah. Good word for it.

Yeah. And you know what look early in the in the pandemic ransomware was about financial gain. right, and now some of these ransomware gangs might have had the wink wink not approval of certain nation states, but we're almost seeing now the the The not ransomware but the encryption the the disruption of operations.

Let's call it. Via, you know taking over encrypting. What have you?

Go beyond just for financial game, right? They're in the pandemic. It seems like North Korea was doing it for hard currency.

They needed the money, right? Well, that's what some folks said. need any aggravation here, but you know But it's not just about the money anymore.

It seems even there's other there's other motives at play here. Yeah without a doubt and that's why I described you know the evolution as I did right that that the beginning of the pandemic it was about extortion. It was about economic games without a doubt in the you know, the fruits of those labors were, you know, seemingly quite good, you know what I mean?

But we have seen this Evolution to this notion of chaos and disruption. I think that's what they're you know, what the data in the report actually Bears out. Yep.

Excuse me. See you mentioned that. A majority of the respondent 6,000 some unrespondence.

You know basically said they're worried about this issue. They're not prepared. Holy prepared for it.

What do they doing about that? So it's it's quite interesting right? Because the deeper in the report.

We also see that this is becoming board level issues. They're certainly cyber is a board lovely issue now, right which is which is a good thing, you know, and I think you know one of the byproducts of that as well, you know in the current economic client that we're you know, many folks are are getting a little conservative with cash and pulling back on it expenditures. We're at least seeing security budgets remain flat or even increased slightly.

So that's a good thing. But I think that's a byproduct of the the board level concern. Fair You know, I'm just sitting here.

I saw across my news today. Of course the White House came out yesterday with some more guidance and so first supply chain and that's palms and all of these things and I mean clearly this. This whole issue around security.

Is is continuing to rise to the board level right this becoming very much. You know, we used to use it as it used to make fun of the security guy selling fud to the board level about whites. They're responsibility, but no kidding.

It really is now right and and it's gonna be it's gonna have consequences what else from this survey Chris kind of jumped out at you. Um, I think one of the other things that jumped out at me particularly is this, you know this perception that cyber warfare is it's in a Faraway distant land, right, you know, you know, the average individual probably thinks you know, this is on some foreign soil somewhere, you know, not realizing that you know, one of the things that wore out in the data was our customers when we looked at the data, they saw a massive, you know, pretty significant spike in inactivity, you know in the six months, you know from May to October 22 as compared to the six months prior, you know, this seems that coincide with you know, obviously the the invasion in Ukraine, but you know at the end of the day, you know, I think the average individual views this as some problem in a far away land from a sea so perspective, right? They they have this combination of you know, you know, it's happening elsewhere not to me necessarily.

You know, how do I protect? You know, my my organization from the Day, you know, you know script Kitty that's trying to break into my environment as well. And what can I do about it?

Got it. It's kind of boggles my mind Chris. Is this the first year you've done this report or if you guys been looking at this?

Um, yes great great coming on. This is the first year. We really support the report sorry.

And again the the ability for us to go into the data that we have in our arm assassinet intelligence engine and really look at details of what's going on from a behavioral perspective, you know, Communications between device types and that sort of thing allows us to draw a lot of conclusions. And then when you combine that with the actual survey with the 6000 it respondents, there's some there's some interesting data that we thought yeah, and we feel compelled to make that available to the marketplace. Absolutely.

Is this something that Like gonna be coming annual kind of thing. Do you know you're not sure yet or I I expect that. We will continue to provide this on a regular basis for sure the insights that we drew there I think are pretty powerful and meaningful to Market at Large.

You know Chris. I always find with these kinds of reports. There's always one result though that You know kind of really like just wow it didn't I do some surprised right either counterintuitive or just I didn't see that coming.

Was there anything here that kind of caught you like that? Yeah. We talked a little bit about it already Ellen just the you know, the fact that this is board level concern right now is on the one hand that was intuitively obvious to me, but it was nice to see it come out but the fact that people actually felt that you know, their governments were reasonably prepared particularly in the US.

I thought was a refreshing. That is because that's usually not the case in these kinds of surveys right people think they're not prepared. Was there a big difference?

Between the US and let's say the EU and then the rest of the world. And some of these yeah, I think there are there are differences between the regions, but generally they align either the trend lines were, you know, pretty similar, you know, you do have a geographic nuances everybody when you Trend and things at the macro level they they were pretty much the same. Very cool.

com. You can get it right off front page there. Yep, correct and the name of the report just so people have it state of cyber Stater cyber warfare actually Correct.

We'll do we'll see you soon, man. Yeah, we'll do thanks a time great connection. Always always a pleasure to have yarn Chris dobrik from Three report on there on there you get it right on their page.

We're going to take a break here on Tech strong, and we're going to be right back.