Sentra Exec Discusses International Cybersecurity Perspectives
Former Israeli intelligence officer Asaf Kochan shares insights at RSA on like-minded forces aligning in the evolving threat landscape.
SAN FRANCISCO, RSA CONFERENCE -- Greater awareness of sensitive data and a call for cultural change within organizations to better support cybersecurity teams were some of the recommendations Asaf Kochan, Sentra's co-founder and president, offered in a conversation with InformationWeek here during the RSA Conference, a cybersecurity industry event underway in San Francisco.
Kochan previously served as commander of Unit 8200, an intelligence corps that specializes in cybersecurity within the Israeli Defense Force. He took some time out from the conference to discuss government responses to data collection, control, and privacy from a cybersecurity perspective, and how national cybersecurity strategies are being developed. The threat landscape, which is being populated by state-backed, bad actors and generative AI tools, seems primed to become even harder to navigate.
Given your background, what areas should organizations take a longer look at in cybersecurity? Have the TikTok hearings brought anything to light about data security?
One simple kind of notion that I saw, again and again, is that bad actors are after sensitive data. It’s so simple, yet you see it again and again. Most organizations kind of try to protect everything. So, you have these particular data stores or places where you have your sensitive data. It might be customer data. It might be personal data. It might be financial data. It might be proprietary [intellectual property]. It might be source code.
At the end of the day, bad actors will get there, and they will chase your sensitive data. And most organizations -- basically their approach is not related to data. They will protect their perimeter; they will protect their network; they will protect their endpoint -- everything besides understanding where the sensitive data is. This is basically a thing I saw again, and again, and again.
This is kind of one fundamental notion. But in the global kind of context, the thing that you started with, is related to a major kind of clash, which is going on between the U.S. and China right now. This clash is about computational dominance, and this clash is from the very basic layer of manufacturing chips, which fuel the computer industry, design infrastructure, core networks, and cloud infrastructure up to the endpoints and to the devices.
Basically, whoever has access to the data can manipulate it, can use it, can bridge it. And the TikTok thing is about where the data sits. Who has access to the data?