Bilal Baig serves as the Technical Director for the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Africa. Baig is skilled at acting as a “hub” between technical and non-technical audiences, communicating “relevant” and “actionable” intelligence and insights in plain language to audiences of all types thanks to his expertise in roles of different kinds in the industry.
Q. How do you see your participation in Gitex this year?
I think every year it gets more and more exciting. You notice the vibe, and you notice the energy level. To be honest, I was discussing with my colleagues the amount of energy in people this year. I’ve never seen this before. So, every year it gets more exciting and amazing and we love to be here.
Q. What are your main areas of focus during this year’s edition?
Our tagline for this year is the power of one. We are going into a phase where cybersecurity is dynamically changing. We have a lot of solutions from Trend Micro, they vary depending on the workforce, we’re looking at cloud; it doesn’t matter where the cloud resides as we’re looking at the networking part, the cloud native applications, and the cloud native security, and then a chunk of the portfolio is in the ICS and IoT, bringing all of these together to give you one view, one analysis, and looking at the threats, not just the threats, we’re looking at the risk analysis in your specific department inside the organization.
We’re more concerned about the attack surface management of an environment. So, if you look at how the flow of the technology is going, it came from EBP to EDR, to XDR, everybody’s talking about XDR. Trend Micro has moved beyond this to look at other vectors to help our customers.
Q. What are some of the new technologies that Trend Micro is working on right now?
Trend Micro always wants to be one step ahead of the adversities. That is our main focus and goal. We work to establish that protection level for our customers. We are always looking at the future threat landscape and how the dynamics of the threat and attack changes, and how we can bring the estimation and solution in this timeframe, we will look at which attacks will occur in the Metaverse. So, with this threat intelligence in mind we try to provide forward-looking tech, we bring those technologies to the business, and we’re always improving towards a SaaS platform, a platform with cybersecurity, not just encompassing your threat landscape, intelligence landscape or XDR, but looking at a lot of business-related vectors to make an informed decision for an organization. So, our technologies are always evolving. We’re adding more and more sophistication into it. The power of one is key for us right now.
Q. What differentiates Trend Micro One from other solutions?
I think everything, we’re in the middle of Gitex surrounded by all the security vendors and whatnot. Many solutions are very point-related or point-product-solutions. We have evolved ourselves away from a point-product solution. That doesn’t mean that we don’t work with them. We have them and we sell them.
We pitch them, but combining the point product solutions into a single unified cybersecurity platform, which does not only do the threat hunting part, it does the next generation of SOC analysis and playbook. These capabilities are what differentiate us. So, if you start adding to the list of the capabilities and the power they have, nobody can catch up with what we currently have in place.
Q. What are some of the major cybersecurity threats that threaten the MENA region?
The most critical and common threat was ransomware infection in the MENA region. The reason that ransomware was crucial was because of the destructive nature of this attack vector. If we look at the numbers, we will see that the vulnerability part of an application on an operating system and how this vulnerability is being exploited to add the ransomware aspect to it are the two major factors behind it. So, in the MENA region, I think the destructive capability of ransomware just as it is happening in the world, is happening over here as well for sure.
Q. What message do you have for our readers?
Somebody asked me, “How can you protect a server? I laughed and said okay, you put it in a box, you take it offline, you power it off and I still don’t believe it is protected. So, it is always a discussion of how important the asset is that you’re protecting and what business operations or objectives you want to achieve. When we’re looking at being a cyber security professional, we are divided into two sectors. One is the personal life concerning your home network and the production and all the devices you and your kids use. So, we have to be wary of having that protection on our home devices. Move that same person outside the home and into an enterprise environment right now, and you’re into a completely different ecosystem. Now we have to be worried about what company assets we use, what cloud services we use, how we look at the email which is coming in and not just click on every single link which is coming in. So, awareness is part of it. On top of that, a layer of technology makes it a better approach to security So, these are the key factors. You can have the best technology, but if you’re not aware of how to use the technology, it is useless even if you spend millions and billions of dollars. So, for us, the key is that you have to be aware of your surroundings in the physical world, and you definitely have to be aware of cyber security in a virtual environment. On top of that, you have the best-of-br
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