McAfee representative highlights cyber security issues facing modern-day networks
AUSTIN–Conventional architecture is not sufficient to deal with the onslaught of cyber security issues in the digital realm. That is the insight of Brett Kelsey, vice president and chief technology strategist for the Americas with McAfee. According to Kelsey, some of the most pertinent threats facing modern-day architecture include data breaches and intellectual property theft.
Kelsey discussed some of the main issues in the cyber security space at the SDxE Software-Defined Enterprise Conference and Expo this week. Kelsey began by drawing on an example of intellectual property theft from Dupont. The company pumped millions of dollars into enhancing the color of white with a chemical compound known as titanium dioxide, which has since been used to paint mustangs, yachts, the lines of tennis courts and even Oreo cookies. Kelsey noted how an organization in China decided to accelerate the development of titanium dioxide by taking the formula illegally from Dupont. Consequently, Dupont lost millions of dollars from an intellectual property perspective, said Kelsey.
A similar example of intellectual property theft in the digital era pertains to mobile vehicle services. Kelsey highlighted that Google’s parent organization, Alphabet, formed an organization called Waymo. An individual at Waymo decided to make their own money by taking 14,000 documents, which went on to be acquired by Uber. “Now there is a multi-billion pending lawsuit between the organizations for theft and intellectual property,” said Kelsey.
Moving to similar issues in the IT landscape, Kelsey said he receives about half-a-million cyber security threats a day. “You can see the acceleration of the point of the threats. That IoT space, that I mentioned only one piece of it, is continuing to grow from a data perspective and how we actually affect the data of those devices.”
Other tech novelties like the cloud have given service providers greater agility, but not enough visibility from a security perspective, according to Kelsey. He said security has not stayed up to pace with the latest tech novelties, and that the next generation of IT professionals view security in a completely different light because of it. “The cyber security space itself is suffering from a major labor shortage. We’re exacerbating this problem with some of other technological advances. The millennials that are starting to come up are driving change in our industry. They live their lives in the cloud. They are bringing with them a whole new mentality. They’re expecting security to be baked into their solutions moving forward.”
Kelsey concluded by emphasizing the need to go beyond existing architecture to address these hurdles. “We got to start seriously looking at how we do things differently. We got to do better with what our design looks like; we got to start looking at a different way of thinking on how we are going to solve these big problems in the overall cyber security space.”
