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Sunday, December 22, 2024 Vol. 20 No. 74
P25.00 nationwide | 2 sections 12 pages | 7 DAYS A WEEK
2025 CRUCIAL FOR CYBERSECURITY
A
By Rizal Raoul Reyes
RTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) will be at the center of Asia Pacificbased organizations in their cybersecurity strategy in 2025, according to global cybersecurity provider Palo Alto Networks. “In 2025, our region will face a perfect storm of AI-driven cyber threats, escalating in scale, sophistication, and impact. The days of fragmented security approaches are over—organizations must pivot to unified platforms powered by transparent and trustworthy AI to stay ahead. As quantum attacks loom and deepfakes become mainstream tools of deception, businesses will either innovate or risk being outpaced by adversaries. The stakes have never been higher, and trust will be the ultimate currency in this new era of cybersecurity. Those who fail to adapt risk not just breaches but irreparable damage to their reputation and resilience,” said Simon Green, President, Asia Pacific and Japan at Palo Alto Networks. In its recent study, Palo Alto also outlined five key trends that cyber practitioners can expect to unfold in the coming 12 months and for which they can position their organizations for a more secure future. First prediction, according to Green: cyber infrastructure will be anchored around a single unified data security platform. In 2025, Green said the organizations will address heightened complexity by reducing the number of cybersecurity tools in use, and shifting to a unified platform, offering enhanced visibility and control. Nevertheless, the ongoing dearth
in talented cybercrime experts will continue to accelerate this trend. On the other hand, Green said there is a benefit as a unified platform will provide end-to-end visibility and context, spanning code repositories, cloud workloads, networks, and security operations centers (SOCs). “Ultimately this creates a more holistic security architecture with fewer dashboards,” he said. Green said demolishing the silos and ensuring the confluence of all security layers onto a unified platform will optimize resources, improve overall efficiency, and enable organizations to build more resilient, adaptive defenses against evolving threats. According to Green, the second trend to watch is the proliferation of deepfakes which, he added, are already being used for nefarious purposes in the APAC region. While some have been used to spread political misinformation, Green said cybercriminals used it to target corporations for financial gain, like the employee at a Hong Kong engineering firm duped into wiring millions of dollars to a scammer who had used deepfakes to imitate the chief financial officer and executive team on a video conference. Classified as a synthetic media, deepfake is typically a video or image that has been edited using AI to replace a person’s likeness
SIMON GREEN, President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Palo Alto Networks: “In 2025, our region will face a perfect storm of AI-driven cyber threats, escalating in scale, sophistication, and impact. The stakes have never been higher, and trust will be the ultimate currency in this new era of cybersecurity.”
OSCAR VISAYA, Country Manager, Philippines, Palo Alto Networks: “Prioritizing unified security platforms and AI advancements will be critical to securing the Philippines’ digital future.”
PASAN JAYASEKARA ARACHCHI VIA DREAMSTIME.COM
To survive the ‘perfect storm’ of AI-driven threats, Asia-Pacific organizations must tear down silos and shun fragmented security approaches, say experts. ciously to spread misinformation, create fake news, or harm individuals’ reputations. While detecting deepfakes can be challenging, there are ongoing efforts to develop tools and techniques to identify them. Green said it’s important to be aware of deepfakes and to critically evaluate the information you encounter online. Green pointed out that clever criminals will capitalize on the ever-improving generative AI technology to launch credible deepfake attacks. He warned that the use of audio deepfakes will also become more prevalent in these attacks, as the available technology allows for highly credible voice cloning. “We can expect deepfakes to be used alone or as part of a larger attack much more often in 2025,” he said. In 2025, there will be a growth in quantum computing projects across APAC, with governments and venture capital firms investing heavily in local initiatives.
Nation-state-backed actors
SIMON GREEN ON DEEPFAKES: “Clever criminals will capitalize on the ever-improving generative AI technology to launch credible deepfake attacks. Audio deepfakes will become more prevalent.” TERO VESALAINEN VIA DREAMSTIME.COM
with someone else’s. Deepfakes are so deceiving that their manipulation, in skilled hands, can be incredibly convincing, making it difficult to distinguish between real and fake content.
Key points about deepfakes
DEEPFAKES are created using ad-
vanced AI techniques, such as deep learning and generative adversarial networks (GANs). They can effectively manipulate facial expressions, speech, and even body language to create highly realistic and often deceptive content. Deepfakes can be used mali-
WHILE quantum attacks on widely used encryption methods are not yet feasible, Green warned that nation-state-backed threat actors are expected to intensify their “harvest now, decrypt later” tactics, targeting highly classified data with the intent to unlock it when quantum technology advances. “This poses a risk to governments and businesses, with the potential to jeopardize civilian and military communications, undermine critical infrastructure, and overcome security protocols for most internet-based financial transactions,” he said. “We will likely also see nationstate actors target organizations developing quantum computers themselves, in corporate espionage attacks,” he added. To counteract these threats effectively, Green urged all orga-
nizations to act and adopt quantum-resistant defenses, including quantum-resistant tunnelling, comprehensive crypto data libraries, and other technologies with enhanced crypto-agility. Transitioning to these algorithms will help secure data against future quantum threats. Organizations that require high security should explore quantum key distribution (QKD) as a means of ensuring secure communications. As quantum computing continues to become more and more of a reality and potential threats loom, Green said it will be essential to adopt these measures to keep pace with the rapidly evolving cyber landscape, prevent data theft and ensure the integrity of their critical systems. For now, he said CIOs can debunk any hype around this topic to the board. Though significant progress with quantum annealing has been made, he said militarygrade encryption has still not been broken. Green said regulators in the APAC region are starting to focus on the data protection and cybersecurity implications of the growing use of AI models. Further, he said this is part of an overall bid to build trust in AI use and encourage AI-driven innovation. In 2025, expect APAC legislators’ AI focus on ethics, data protection and transparency to remain. However, Green said increased use of AI models will lead to greater emphasis being placed on AI security and the integrity and reliability of the data being used. “Transparency and proactive communication about AI model mechanics—specifically regarding data collection, training datasets, and decision-making processes— will be essential for building customer trust,” he said. Continued on A2
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 58.9980 n JAPAN 0.3748 n UK 73.7829 n HK 7.5935 n CHINA 8.0879 n SINGAPORE 43.3586 n AUSTRALIA 36.7912 n EU 61.1455 n KOREA 0.0408 n SAUDI ARABIA 15.7056 Source: BSP (December 20, 2024)