A supercharged year mixing cyberattacks and the coronavirus has changed all of the world’s geopolitical rules for rivalries between countries, Check Point CEO Gil Shwed said at The Jerusalem Post-Khaleej Times’ Global Investment Forum in Dubai on Wednesday.
Speaking to the conference by Zoom, Shwed said that, “countries and businesses are all realizing the changing shape of life. In the past, there were clear rules about retaliation and why should someone attack someone else.”
“Now, all the rules are being redefined and it is much harder to attribute who is behind” a cyberattack than a physical/kinetic attack on a country or business.
He noted that another new variable with cyberattacks that grew this past year was that, “governments can use the private sector to attack. They allow a criminal organization to spread the seeds [of malware] and get into many places.”
Then at a later date, the sponsoring government “can take over the network and start its own [cyber] attack... and if you are exposed, you can say it was not you, but the criminal organization.”
At this point, Shwed said: “Almost every government in the world is trying to infiltrate its enemy,” using cyber tools which “do not risk human lives, but can have a devastating effect.”
If in the past, countries could only attack other nearby nations, “now they can attack across the world” and “every country can collect information about every country,” using cyber methods.
He said that cyber was being used massively by all countries’ intelligence services and that there was a tremendous spike in information theft in the Middle East region.
Shwed referenced a new wave of cyber “attacks shutting down entire sectors of infrastructure – it’s real, we are seeing it.”
Warning that, “businesses cannot rely on the government” to defend them from foreign cyberattacks, he said that even the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD), considered one of the world’s more powerful cyber bodies, “does not have the tools to stop all attacks.”
He added that in some cases Check Point and other private sector companies are the ones who tip off the INCD that a cyberattack is underway in Israel.
Addressing the Abraham Accords, Shwed said that though his company was a trailblazer with an office in the UAE already for more than a decade, business with the UAE has jumped this past year with both the UAE public and private sectors showing a greater level of interest and trust in Israeli cyber technologies.