Bay Area ASEI Event Makes Clear: Cybersecurity is Everyone’s Job
India-West Staff Reporter
FREMONT, CA – When it comes to cyber threats, one can’t always predict when one will occur. But one can prepare. The American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) hosted a virtual ‘Cybersecurity Summit’ with 20 speakers on May 21.
Voices representing the cybersecurity industry – software vendors, risk management consultants, cyber industry innovators, emerging technology startups, and government and company board representatives were present, a press release said.
The summit was co-chaired by ASEI National President Piyush Malik who is the Chief Digital & Transformation Officer at Veridic solutions and Bhawna Singh, a Senior Vice President of Engineering at Cybersecurity vendor. They began by contextualizing the what and why of cybersecurity and the threat landscape: 59% of Americans have experienced cybercrime, 70% of small businesses are completely unprepared for a cyberattack, 88% of professional hackers can infiltrate an organization within 12 hours and globally, nearly $7 trillion is lost to cybercrime.
In his keynote, titled ‘Enabling Engineers to Build a Secure Future,’ Ankur Shah from Palo Alto Networks talked about supply chains being the new targets of malicious actors and gave tips to the engineers in the community. He stressed on security as a shared responsibility and presented a solution of breaking silos by prescribing a DevSecOps approach and leveraging automation.
Aastha Verma as Department of homeland security’s CISA Branch Chief for Vulnerabilities shared a lot of resources to help the audience understand how the government and public can work hand in hand to curb the cyber risks. She drew attention to the “Shields up” and “Presidents Cup” initiatives which are all available on the CISA website.
Jyothsna Lekkala from Zoom then talked about Software Supply Chain Security and how it has evolved from physical to software more so since the 9/11 attacks.
Moderated by Invigrid CEO Yogita Parulekar , a panel focussed on the daunting talent gap in the cybersecurity space with panelists Chirag Shah, Nataraj Nagaratnam and Laxmish Bhat. The ‘Women in Cybersecurity’ panel was led by Chitra Dharmarajan with panelists Rupa Mittapalli, Upasna Saluja and Anusha Vaidhyanathan .
With an explosion of sensor infused devices around us from wearables to cameras to even microwaves and refrigerators etc all estimated to touch 55.7 Billion IOT devices by 2025, Agas Somasundaram talked about why IOT security is important.
The geopolitical panel was moderated by author Niharika Srivastav and addressed geopolitical instability caused by threats from Russia-Ukraine war as well as rouge-nations. The panelists were Rita Archrekar, Anshu Gupta and Vishal Chawla
The Cybersecurity summit closing keynote on ‘Insider threats, Information Sharing with Entity Resolution and Privacy’ by Design came from former IBM Fellow Jeff Jonas, who was beaming in from France talking about how technologies he invented like Non Obvious Relationships Awareness have led him to detect and protect Las Vegas Casinos from millions of dollars of fraud.
The vote of thanks by ASEI National director Sam Ladwa, wrapped up the event.
There was the eagerness and enthusiasm through the entire event with over 165 attendees participating, a press release said.
