Paco Dennis
SF VIP
- Location
- Mid-Missouri
"One of the world’s leading cybersecurity experts has just warned that the alarming new surge in malicious apps is a much more serious threat to iPhone users than you might think. iPhones, he says, have a surprising security vulnerability.
“We're all wide open,” the billionaire founder of Check Point tells me. “And attackers are not missing that.” I last talked to Gil Shwed just before the world was struck down by Covid-19. Everything has changed, he tells me now. “The attack surface has greatly expanded. We've seen this huge surge in mobile and malicious apps.”
Android’s reputation for securing its fragmented ecosystem is not good—the widely held view is that iPhone’s are much safer. But you can buy an Android and lock it down fairly easily. Not so with an iPhone. Apple makes its devices harder to attack, but also harder to protect. You are reliant on Apple to do the work for you—and so, for users and companies now under attack, Shwed warns that this has become a serious issue, that the security risks between the two platforms are now “balanced.”
Before Covid-19, the world was relatively simple. “If you’re easy to attack,” Shwed told me then, you will be attacked. “So, just make your network and systems harder to penetrate than those around you.” But now, he says, “with half the companies in the world, there's evidence that [at least one] employee has a malicious application and therefore may be susceptible to attack from the outside.”
A year ago, we talked nation state cyber, the threats from China, Russia and Iran. Now, despite Solar Winds, to say nothing of the Microsoft Exchange nightmare that hit just after our meeting, the security implications of the world’s companies throwing open their systems to newly remote workforces are even more front of mind.
Everything is mobile, remote, and we’re still not ready for that. “All our systems are now accessible by external entities—first and foremost, our employees, but then our suppliers, our vendors, they all do remote monitoring, remote work on our systems. The hackers didn't lose sight of that and they are taking advantage of that.”"
5 minute read
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...-and-samsung-android-warns-cyber-billionaire/
“We're all wide open,” the billionaire founder of Check Point tells me. “And attackers are not missing that.” I last talked to Gil Shwed just before the world was struck down by Covid-19. Everything has changed, he tells me now. “The attack surface has greatly expanded. We've seen this huge surge in mobile and malicious apps.”
Android’s reputation for securing its fragmented ecosystem is not good—the widely held view is that iPhone’s are much safer. But you can buy an Android and lock it down fairly easily. Not so with an iPhone. Apple makes its devices harder to attack, but also harder to protect. You are reliant on Apple to do the work for you—and so, for users and companies now under attack, Shwed warns that this has become a serious issue, that the security risks between the two platforms are now “balanced.”
Before Covid-19, the world was relatively simple. “If you’re easy to attack,” Shwed told me then, you will be attacked. “So, just make your network and systems harder to penetrate than those around you.” But now, he says, “with half the companies in the world, there's evidence that [at least one] employee has a malicious application and therefore may be susceptible to attack from the outside.”
A year ago, we talked nation state cyber, the threats from China, Russia and Iran. Now, despite Solar Winds, to say nothing of the Microsoft Exchange nightmare that hit just after our meeting, the security implications of the world’s companies throwing open their systems to newly remote workforces are even more front of mind.
Everything is mobile, remote, and we’re still not ready for that. “All our systems are now accessible by external entities—first and foremost, our employees, but then our suppliers, our vendors, they all do remote monitoring, remote work on our systems. The hackers didn't lose sight of that and they are taking advantage of that.”"
5 minute read
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...-and-samsung-android-warns-cyber-billionaire/
