In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, cybersecurity is more critical than ever. As cyber adversaries continue to grow more sophisticated, organizations face increasing challenges in protecting their assets from complex cross-domain attacks. Amid these challenges, unified security has emerged as a key strategy to effectively counteract evolving threats. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal recently engaged in an insightful conversation with Fabio Fratucello, Chief Technology Officer, International at CrowdStrike. Fabio shares his insights on the rising sophistication of cyberattacks, the pressing need for unified security platforms, and the dual-edged impact of AI on cybersecurity.
Rajeev: How are cyber attackers evolving their methods to bypass traditional defenses?
Fabio: Cyber adversaries continue to increase their sophistication, becoming more agile and precise in their attacks by exploiting gaps across endpoints, identities, and multi-cloud environments. Traditional, siloed security solutions struggle to keep up because they lack a unified perspective and the holistic visibility needed to detect and respond to attacks. This fragmented approach creates blind spots that attackers can exploit.
Organisations are discovering that layering more tools only compounds complexity, leading to operational inefficiencies. By contrast, modern unified security platforms streamline visibility across the entire attack surface, enabling faster detection and more precise responses. This approach not only outpaces adversaries but also reduces operational overheads.
Rajeev: What are the key challenges organizations face in identifying and responding to sophisticated cyber threats, especially in India market?
Fabio: With the average breakout time now just 62 minutes, as reported in CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report, compromised credentials and malware-free techniques are becoming attackers’ go-to strategies, making them harder to detect and stop. Cross-domain attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities across endpoints, identities and cloud environments, present one of the most pressing challenges organisations face today.
Adversaries thrive on fragmented security postures, where point solutions, disconnected workflows, and data silos create visibility gaps and blind spots in their organisation’s detection and response capabilities. These blind spots are then taken advantage by adversaries, who often mimic legitimate operations to avoid detection. To address this, organisations need comprehensive solutions that integrate endpoint, identity, and cloud security. Unified platforms close these gaps, enabling seamless detection and rapid responses that thwart even the most sophisticated threats.
Rajeev: What steps can businesses take to safeguard their networks from external cyber threats and ensure data security in the cloud?
Fabio: As businesses increasingly adopt cloud and multi-cloud strategies, they expand their attack surfaces. Alarmingly, CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report highlights a 75% surge in cloud intrusions over the past two years.
It’s critical for businesses to understand the shared responsibility model. While cloud providers secure their infrastructure, customers must secure their own applications and data. Many businesses, unsure of their responsibilities, have deployed multiple point solutions, creating security gaps that adversaries exploit.
To safeguard their data, applications and environments in the cloud, businesses need to prioritise cloud security within the broader security strategy. This includes the technology, policies, services and security controls that are deployed across the cloud environments.
Identity security capabilities are also critical because compromised credentials allow adversaries to gain access to systems and environments quickly, without needing to exploit a vulnerability or a misconfiguration. As a result, businesses need to be adopting identity security solutions that help them to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber threats across both cloud and on-premises environments.
Rajeev: How is AI both enhancing cybersecurity and introducing new risks for organizations?
Fabio: AI and Generative AI are revolutionising the business landscape, but at the same time are a growing target for cyberattacks. Adversaries are actively targeting AI services and large language models (LLMs), threatening the integrity of the data and applications that drive these capabilities. From data exposure to supply-chain risks, the potential for threats to AI systems is growing as fast as AI technology comes to market.
Misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and breaches in AI systems can have far-reaching consequences. To better manage this risk, organisations need specialised security capabilities that can monitor AI environments, identify vulnerabilities and detect misconfigurations.
With AI security posture management (AI-SPM), organisations can proactively defend their AI environments, continuously monitoring AI systems for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and threats. AI-SPM helps organisations to maintain the integrity of their AI-enabled operations, keep AI deployments secure and resilient, and meet regulatory obligations.
Rajeev: How does a unified security platform improve an organization’s ability to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber threats more effectively?
Fabio: Unified security platforms are vital to organisations’ ability to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber threats. Modern, unified security platforms consolidate visibility across endpoint, identity, and cloud environments to reveal even the most elusive threats, with real-time alerts that provide faster identification and mitigation of evasive tactics.
By bringing together data and workflows, a unified platform helps organisations stay ahead of adversaries by enabling security teams to act decisively, automate and orchestrate their response, and outpace attackers.
Unified platforms also reduce the cost of operating multiple point solutions, by lowering the reliance on specialised expertise to maintain capabilities, simplifying operations, and reducing cyber insurance premiums.
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