Kathy Gibson reports – One of the best-funded industries in the world is cybercrime.
Indeed, it generated revenue of more than $10-trillion last year – close to double what the next-biggest industry (pharmaceuticals) – earned.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that a massive 50% of South Africans’ identities have been compromised, says David-Chancellor Maddison, cyber practice program leader: EMEA at IBM, addressing delegates at First Distribution’s IBM Power 11 launch today.
And, just last year, South African government departments lost R2,2-billion from cyberattacks, he adds.
“In light of these numbers, operational resilience is key for end user customers as they need to keep their busineses running when they are attacked,” Maddison says
The cyberthreat landscape is changing, so companies have to keep their defences up to date.
Maddison points out there has been an upsurge in infostealers, leading to an 84% increase per week in the number of attacks using valid credentials.
This is proving more successful in ransomware, with 28% of attacks ending in ransomware incidents – and some of the world’s largest companies are going out of business as a result of ransomware attacks.
“AI is not yet being used in most attacks,” says Maddison. “But it will be.” Threat actors are starting to use AI to build websites and incorporate deepfakes into phishing attacks, with GenAI now being used for some new attacks.
Cloud is still the number one place where hackers get information about organisations. “So if you are not running quantum algorithms inside the cloud, you could be at risk,” Maddison warns.
The most common attack impact is data theft. “They are not even asking for money for it; they are just taking it in 42% of instances. And, once quantum computing is available, they will be able to decrypt it.”
The other most common impact is credential harvesting at 29%.
The Middle East and Africa is the second-most targeted geography after Asia-Pacific, with manufacturers the top target industry.
“You can see why manufacturing is popular,” Maddison comments. “Once you are in the system, the amount of leverage you have is incredible.”
The big question, he adds, is what companies are going to do about it.
“They need to map protection technology to the threat landscape.”
The first stop is identity verification, and Power 11 layers multi-factor authentication with two-person integrity. It also includes ransomware detection, where every IO is tested, while applications are scanned with additional enhanced app scanning.
To mitigate data theft, Power 11 offers Quantum Safe, which encrypts data at rest and offers key management via GKL. Since most infiltration takes place while data is moving, Power 22 Quantum Safe also protects data in transit.
For recovery, the Power 11 Clean Room is a secure environment where data is scanned and mounted. It provides enhanced vault scanning, so organisations have a golden copy that is immutable.
Speed of recovery is paramount, so the clean room provides data availability within less than 60 seconds. And IT organisations can spin up any number of clean rooms, creating multiple sources of clean data. And since the clean room is on the primary source, it can be restored within seconds.
“There is no other combination of technology that can do all of that,” Maddison concludes.
Resilience enables business continuity
Along with cybersecurity, cyber resilience is one of the core benefits enabled by the new IBM Power 11 infrastructure offerings.
Ashwin Srinivas, senior product manager: AI with IBM Power, points out that attacks on enterprise are becoming more frequent, with worsening consequences. At the same time, regulations are driving a need for increased security and resilience.
This is why the IBM Power 11 aims to ensure cyber resilience, protection, and security by design to protect the enterprise, he tells delegates to First Distribution’s IBM Power 11 launch in Johannesburg today.
“Cyber resilience is at the core, and end-to-end,” he says. “IBM Power 11 has the ability to detect a ransomware attack within one minute. And automated response and recover y within minutes ensures customers are back up and running quickly.”
IBM Power11 servers are designed with advanced security features including quantum-safe cryptography to protect against future threats, and are built for resilience with capabilities for zero-downtime maintenance and rapid ransomware threat detection.
Power11 implements the Quantum-Safe Secure Boot process that uses quantum-resistant algorithms for digital signatures, ensuring the integrity of the entire software stack – from firmware to operating system – against emerging quantum-era threats.
Hardware Memory Tagging protects against vulnerabilities like buffer overflows and side-channel exploits by validating any buffer access, safeguarding system integrity.
With IBM Power Cyber Vault, Power11 offers less than one-minute guaranteed ransomware threat detection, contributing to overall business continuity.
By using advanced automation capabilities, Power11 aims to achieve 99,9999% uptime, minimising planned downtime for system maintenance.
And the servers are built with features like memory encryption and automated key lifecycle management to enhance system integrity and data protection, and are designed to protect against “harvest-now, decrypt-later” attacks.
“The multi-layered defence ensures there is a reduced attack surface,” Srinivas says. “And IBM Power 11 also ensure business continuity with cyber resilience that gets the business back up and running quickly in the event of a successful attack.”
Importantly, these features are all automated.
Quantum Safe technology is a key element in IBM’s security arsenal.
Srinivas explains that much of today’s cryptography relies on hard mathematics which the most powerful classical computer would take millions of years to decrypt. Quantum computers, however, could crack the same code in a matter of hours.
“So any system that uses current algorithms is at risk,” he says.
This is because criminals are not waiting for quantum computing to become widely available: they are harvesting data now, to be decrypted later. “At that time, they will be able to disrupt your business,” Srinivas says.
“This means quantum compliance migration is a journey that should begin today.”
Quantum Safe Remediation can do inventory discovery and risk prioritisation today, he adds, and is packaged as part of Power 11.
IBM Concert ensures zero downtime
The IBM Power 11 introduction has not been a traditional technology launch. Instead of focusing on speeds and feeds, IBM has spoken instead about the real business impacts that Power 11 can have.
Ronnie Moodley, global principal sales leader: Power at IBM, stresses that one of the core messages has been about eliminating business disruption with zero downtime.
“This is what customers told us they want,” he says.
Planned downtime is a major cost for IT organisations, he adds, with the annual average cost coming in at $5,6-million.
A system that offers zero planned downtime means these costs are eliminated.
IBM Concert is an application-centric resilience hub that unifies siloed data across cost, runtime, incident, and release tools. Customers can proactively manage their security to reduce the time spent on CVE mitigation by 90%.
Using AI, Concert uncovers crucial insights about operations, and provides application-specific recommendations for improvement.
Apart from AI-driven recommendations and remediation tips, it offers automated data analysis from disparate systems and tools, plus insights and remediation recommendations that lead to a lower mean time to resolution.
Concert lets IT teams be more proactive about application health and security by identifying operational issues before they escalate, leading to higher application uptime and lower risk.
IBM Power will interoperate with IBM Concert using generative AI to help identify operational risks, provide actionable insights, and automate remediation, starting with security patch management.