Acronis VP on Safer Internet Day – Interview with Candid Wuest

TECHx conducted an exclusive interview of Candid Wüest who is VP of Cyber Protection Research at Acronis. Candid discussed current internet based threats for businesses, policies organizations should adopt – and some useful tips on internet safety in remote working.

TECHx: In the context of Safer Internet Day, what are the most important internet-based threats for businesses to be aware of in 2021?

Candid Wuest: 2021, the year of multi-data level extortion when a holistic approach to cyber protection becomes a necessity or the goal to achieve. Businesses should watch out for an increase in attacks on misconfigured cloud buckets, or misconfigured cloud data instances. These cloud attacks are just the beginning as attackers are extending their reach further and target serverless applications, APIs and container frameworks.

From industrial OT and IoT to cloud environments, there are unfortunately many profitable opportunities for cybercriminals, which can only be anticipated or stopped with the right cyber protection. Another trend to be aware of is that attackers also like to use existing tools within the infrastructure against the victim such as finding domain administrators or managed consoles to uninstall all security software, delete all available backups before using the same distribution channel to roll out malware across the company.

TECHx: With the rise of social media, how can we nurture and increase public awareness on cybersecurity, so that people become more responsible when using technology and digital gadgets.

Candid Wuest: To address cyber criminality related to social media issues, organizations should review their internal policy by being transparent with employees, providing guidance on how to stay safe on the internet professionally and personally, and implementing a clear set of rules around the use of social media at/for work. When it comes to content, and its access, they can also adjust the access rights of individuals, user groups and specific users. One of the first challenges when it comes to topics related to cyber criminality is to convince people, businesses and individuals, of its existence or the usefulness of the appropriate cyber protection strategy. Employees should be trained, continuously informed and updated. Individuals should have easy access to accurate information to improve their social media and internet behaviors.

TECHx: On the occasion of Safer Internet Day 2021, give us some tips on how to stay safe on the internet in today’s remote working scenario.

Candid Wuest: Here are the ten tips to stay safe in remote working:

1. Keep operating systems and applications up-to-date on your devices
2.  Perform regular backups (have multiple copies)
3.  Use filtering and security settings in your email system
4. Enable Acronis Active Protection
5. Teach users how to avoid becoming malware or ransomware victims
6. Segment the network to curtail worm propagation
7. Grant administrative rights only to users and applications that absolutely need them
8.  Enable the newest security features in business applications
9.  Use strong unique passwords for each service and where ever possible multi-factor authentication.   
10. Use social media carefully