InfoWatch Group has taken part in the second annual Business Information Security Summit Saint Petersburg (BIS Summit SPb 2018) supported by the Government of Saint Petersburg and the Educational and Methodological Association of Russian Universities for Information Security Education, with the event being focused on digital economy cybersecurity and advanced enterprise information security training initiatives.
The plenary session Role of Cybersecurity in Digital Economy, moderated by Ilya Massukh, President of Information Democracy Development Foundation, was attended by Olga Reshetova, Deputy Chairperson of the Information and Communication Committee at the Government of Saint Petersburg; Natalya Kaspersky, President of InfoWatch Group; Georgy Gritsay, Acting Director for Information Security at Independent Non-Profit Organization Data Economy; as well as business people of the Northwestern Federal District of Russia and government officials and business representatives from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
As part of the session, Natalya Kaspersky spoke about the risks and threats coming from the rash adoption of innovations by the Russian economy, pointing out that, according to the International Monetary Fund, a large-scale economy digitalization program and a finance reform in India caused more than 1% GDP reduction, mainly due to haste, lack of technical facilities, and unrecognized cybersecurity issues.
“By hastily adopting much-talked-of foreign technologies, we risk becoming entirely dependent on foreign vendors and thus may face digital colonization in the future,” noted Natalya Kaspersky. “The best path to the digital economy would be to opt for and use technologies made mainly by local R&D teams and vendors. But to do this, Russia needs to develop its educational and scientific facilities and focus on elaborating a regulatory framework for digital economy.”
The plenary session attendees reached an understanding that overall digitalization of the social life calls for a balance between the transparency of systems and their access fragmentation. As an example, Yaroslav Zholobov, Director of the Russian State University of Justice, mentioned the implementation of a court rulings database, which, on the one hand, makes information transparent and readily available, while on the other, can be used to trigger social and political disruption.
The session also raised the issues of information security professional training and statutory regulation. Thus, Alexander Averbukh, Head of IT Center, Granit-Electron Group, called for a comprehensive approach to the professional training of information security and IT specialists, while Georgy Gritsay told the attendees about regulatory ‘sandboxes’ that are to be introduced to adjust the legislation on the go without impeding industry development.
During the second part of plenary discussions, Rustem Khairetdinov, Vice President of InfoWatch Group, CEO at Attack Killer Protection, shared the opinion that as cyber criminals are becoming increasingly skilled and robotized, human mind cannot cope with cyber threats all alone but can leverage Artificial Intelligence for some tasks.
In addition, InfoWatch experts joined round tables on information security education, ICS protection, business process security, and cybersecurity in a blurred enterprise perimeter.
BIS Summit was visited by InfoWatch partners from the UAE, Egypt and England, including Hisham Magdy, Maged Magdy (Global Solutions), Yazen Jammalih (Ferostaal), Khaled Fattal (MLi Group) and a delegation from the Ajman Digital Government, led by CEO Ohoud Ali Shehail.
“BIS summit was discussing many topical cyber security issues and how we are going to deal with it, and it focused on how it will impact digital economy, besides the uprising of AI applications,” said Hisham Magdy, General Manager of Global Solutions. “What inspired me is how the leaders at the Summit are thinking and how they do not underestimate the challenge. These concepts and technologies that we found at the Summit is going to help us in Egypt in developing and protecting our growing economy “.
