More broadband access, more security threats-Sheldon Hand

The Territory Manager, Symantec, covering sub-Saharan Africa Indian Ocean Islands, West, East and Central Africa (IWECA), Mr. Sheldon Hand, whose role is primarily around business development of Symantec products and solutions to customers across Africa and other regions shares some insights with DigitalSENSE Business News on Nigeria’s cyber threats global ranking.

Tell us about Symantec, and some specifics of its business?

MOST people know Symantec, for antivirus technology, that has been our background and pedigree for more than 20 years. However, today, our position is more on information protection; we believe if we protect information, you protect the business. So, our product profile solutions are more than antivirus software. We provide security software backup and recovery software and most importantly disaster discovery software.

Among all this, which one will you say is the key driver of the rest, as the main title of Symantec?

So, Symantec is more and more synonymous with security software so as we see it more and more today, more people connecting to the internet with mobile devices, laptops, tablets, there is a lot of information transverse across these networks and across the world. So there is a greater need for information security, so I would say the thing that most people know Symantec for is the stand of our company in protecting customer information with our security software.

How would you evaluate the level of protection of information in Nigeria and across Africa?

Recently, we have internet security threats tripled. What we released is freely available to everybody. This report is an analysis of all the threats on the internet, the way we gather the information is we scan over 8 billion emails per day. We have more than 240,000 censors in 200 countries. These censors are networks in strategic places, and what this allows us to do is to gather a tremendous amount of information and intelligence about the threats that are happening in the world on the internet.

So when it comes to Nigeria specifically, we have specific statistics for Nigeria. Last year, Nigeria was ranked the 66th, which means that is the 66th country with the highest internet threats. This year, the 2011 report which was released in April, Nigeria ranked number 59th in the world.

Does this mean it has come down?

No, If you rank number 1, it means you have the most internet security threat, so Nigeria has gone from 66 to 59 which means security threats have increased. The reason for that and our perception to why this is happening are three things; the first one is Nigeria’s economy is booming, it is estimated that about 2015 Nigeria’s economy will be bigger than South Africa’s economy, this is estimated by Morgan Stanley Research.

What we are seeing is a trend where there is a booming economy and there is money, and there is increase cyber activity - cyber threats. Basically what it is this day is that the criminals are using cyber threats really to steal information and to trade that information rather than the old days when people are sending viruses to shut down your system for fame and glory. Today, it’s all about stealing information and trading that information, so that’s the one thing.

The other thing is over the couple of years, we have seen an increase in the broadband capacity in Nigeria. So, the internet with broadband is a platform for malicious activities for security threats in one of two ways. One, it gives head opportunity, you know you’ve got a vehicle into a country because of high bandwidth and it also gives opportunity to be the source of security threat because of the internet.

And the third reason why we suspect that there is an increased security threat in Nigeria is because of the adoption of mobile devices which has increased significantly as there are lots of people using android, iphone, blackberry, tablets and many others.

Are you saying that the more access you have, the more security threat the country faces?

Absolutely, that is correct.

But how can we reverse this?

It is obviously awareness, making people understand that connecting computer to the internet, there are certain risks and there are ways to automatically address those risks. So, first of all it’s by educating people on ground what the security risks are and how to address those risks and one way to mitigate those risks is by getting security software to protect their systems.

With the analogy you have just given, do you see the trend declining or increasing, for instance in Nigeria?

We believe it will increase because as I said the economy is booming, even with more bandwidth and you have not even started to saturate the bandwidth capacity yet. And the adoption of mobile devices will continue to rise. So, we believe the security threat will continue.

So, what would be the way out?

The way out really is a collaborative effort between business, citizens and consumers and all about awareness around how to protect themselves from these cyber security threats, so one is to make sure that as an example our software doesn’t work on pirated Windows machine. People using pirated Windows typically can’t install security software on that machine which makes that machine vulnerable and once that machine is vulnerable, it has the ability to infect other machines within a network.

So as an example, what often happens with network; you have got your work laptop which should be configured with security software but if it’s not, what happens is if somebody turns that laptop on, you plug it in at home and you are accessing the internet via typically on an unsecured network. If that laptop gets infected and you take it back to the office, it has the potential to affect the other systems in the office.

So, moving forward, what would be your advice to Nigerians and generally the business sector in the country?

From a business perspective, you know there is real threats out there and businesses should make effort to understand what these risks are and Symantec want to play a part with business and that’s why we have things like the business security threats which we released to customers to get them a view of what those threats are but that’s one part of our business.

I also mentioned we do information protection, also things like backup recovery and disaster recovery, now obviously, events of late have actually proved that there are disasters that are definitely not planned. Nobody ever sees them coming, but you have to actually plan in a way to protect those unforeseen disaster and you have to make sure that your systems are backup so that you can recover from the disaster.

In a survey that we did recently, we surveyed about 1400 customers and it’s within the ranges of small and medium business customers. Half of these small business customers said that they do not have a disaster recovery platform for the IT systems for their businesses which means that they are really hoping and relying on the hardware they got was very reliable and that nothing catastrophic could happen to the environment which is obviously high risk.

It’s better to think about insurance policy, it’s rather a gradual process, you pay premium every month hopefully nothing ever goes wrong, so you actually never realize the payout.  But in a way it’s just a cost that you incurred in case something thus go wrong.

If something does go wrong eventually and you want your payout quickly, there are no surprises and that’s what we offer customers as an insurance policy for information. Investing in our technology will protect your information, if something goes wrong you can recover quickly.

When you gave the analogy of insurance with the kind of savings your company is offering, what happens if it is here in Nigeria, someone who subscribes to that eventually has a system failure, what is the process of getting the recovery from Symantec?

First of all, we do have local Symantec people on the ground in Nigeria. So these are people that work for Symantec, this is a mixture of both sales and technical people, so many of these have direct relationship with our end users customers, businesses. So they are always available to facilitate a disaster. We also have a world class support services that we provide to our customers globally which is a 24/7 services, if customers have any problem they can contact us by email or telephone.

And as a Software Company, we can help those customers remotely through the disaster process and we have a lot of experiences doing that.

How long is the experience, you said over 20 years?

So, in my experience the only time we haven’t been able to recover customers data is actually when they haven’t been backed up in the first place and what often happens is that customers assume that they are backing up information but they are not. So they don’t have a quick policy in place to double-check that the backup actually happen and the other challenge is that customers don’t test frequently enough, we don’t see customers testing recoveries from the backup or doing backups recovery testing. And there is a number of reasons for that, the reasons you obviously require additional infrastructure to test your recoveries, it takes time for people to actually do that, it requires a certain level of expertise to do that and many customers and companies are really just driving by the day-to-day precious around deriving revenue and a lot of them don’t have the resources to invest in doing proper adequate recovery testing.

... Making SENSE of digital revolution!