Tech Transformed

The phone scam has been in the cybercriminal's playbook for decades, but the pandemic has lead to a sharp increase of these attacks. According to Eric Griffith from PC Mag, According to Eric Griffith from PC Mag, a well constructed phone scam can exploit more money than a scam conducted via email, social media, websites or apps. This becomes all the more concerning with our reliance on our phones in 2021, particularly when employees work from home.

With the increase of remote working and fewer people in conventional workplaces, the need for communication tools has of course increased, but call centres are now sifting through more work than anybody could have anticipated. For some, call volumes increased by 800%, which has created intense work pressure for employees. Cybercriminals have now adapted their phone scam methods to specifically target call centres, leaving them vulnerable to attacks and placing huge responsibilities on customer service staff. 

The Evolution of the Phone Scam

Voice phishing, or 'Vishing', is a form of social engineering attack that is primarily used to steal privileged credentials from corporations. The aim is to manipulate the target into exposing a weakness in the company, leading to data leaks or cybertheft. Vishing is not new, but it evolves continuously; changes in the market lead to changes in behaviour, which lead to new tactics. Joining us on in this podcast is Nikolay Gaubitch, Director of Research at Pindrop. Throughout this podcast, Nikolay will explain the dangers of vishing, how it affects call centres and what you can do to protect your business from a devastating phone scam.

Security threats are unavoidable and inescapable for modern businesses. No matter the size of the enterprise, dealing with the likes of data breaches and ransomware attackers has become commonplace. The key, then, is to know how exactly to detect and respond to these incidents. With new threat hunting and detection technologies, tools, and techniques being created each quarter, the security solutions pool is becoming bigger and bigger.  

In this podcast, Chris Steffen, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), speaks with Dr. Anton Chuvakin, Head of Solutions Strategy at Chronicle and Google Cloud, about the emerging trends in threat hunting and investigation, as well as incident response. The conversation kicks off with a look at the challenges that organisations face when a breach occurs and the proliferation of high-profile security breaches and ransomware attacks within legacy systems. Dr. Anton then lends his expertise on the act of combining intelligence about global threats in the wild, threats inside your network, and unique signals from the overlap between the two, before delving into top tips for overcoming the “signal to noise” ratio. To close, the pair explore the impact of President Biden’s Executive Order on Cybrsecurity and the latest trends in threat hunting and investigation.

The world of artificial intelligence and machine learning is everchanging, with new trends being discovered every year. In the wake of GDPR in 2018, the use of such technologies was applied to legal documents, company legislations and privacy regulations. In 2019, this trend continued while others experimented with incorporating AI into video game design. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic meant that AI was used to create digital workers, making up for medial labour that users would usually perform while in the office. In 2021, we are seeing new trends, but we are also seeing barriers.

According to IDC, the artificial intelligence market is forecast to grow 16.4% by the end of 2021, but even still, obstacles stand in the way for innovation and even for development. Deploying machine learning is difficult; that's why, for this exclusive EM360 podcast, we are speaking to Dr. Eugene Izhikevich, CEO of Brain Corp. In this podcast, we will be delving into some of the biggest problems facing the AI landscape today, predictions for 2021 and some of the solutions.

With new analytic trends emerging as we delve deeper into this decade, organisations are starting to pay attention to solutions and tools that offer them greater insights into their data. A study from Forrester Research revealed that less than 0.5% of all data is ever analysed and used, while only 12% of enterprise data is used to make decisions. As it currently stands, much of our data is confined to silos, meaning that it is too segmented to be analysed, while many organisations still have not received enough training to empower their data scientists and fix the data gap. The quickest solution would be to invest in a technology that performs much of the analysis for you automatically, i.e. augmented analytics.

Augmented analytics is one of the latest data trends and for good reason; it implements machine learning and natural language processing to automate analysis processes that would usually be conducted by an expert in that field. Essentially, data is processed faster than it would be by a human, which also makes it cost effective. Despite this, some organisations remain concerned about the implementation process, the perceived risks and the costs.

Joining us in this EM360 podcast is Rohit Maheshwari, Head of Strategy and Product at Subex. In this episode, we talk to him in depth about the benefits of augmented analytics, how it can bring value to your business and the restrictions of legacy software.

Implementing AI to automate sales and financial duties is nothing new, but recently there has been a lot of discussion related to AI powered Order-to-Cash platforms. In nearly every sector, reducing waiting times means reducing costs, but Order-to-Cash AI can also be the key to customer retention and expansion while also speeding up financial processes. In 2021, we are attempting to bounce back from a massive disruption, but that disruption has meant the development of new technologies that allow organisations to excel. Securing customers and retaining pre-existing customer bases has been cited as the biggest challenge to 61% of companies by SEM Rush. So, could Order-to-Cash platforms be the solution?

Joining us on this EM360 podcast is Mark Sheldon, CTO of Sidetrade. In this episode, Mark delves into the the impact of Order-to-Cash AI on sales and finance teams, how payment intelligence software can benefit ROI and cost reduction as well as exploring the top considerations for organisations to be aware of before investing in AI for their sales and finance teams. 

As more and more businesses experience latency issues in traditional cloud databases, edge computing is now more popular than ever before. Having a device at the edge of your network allows for smoother run times while also synchronising with other geo-distributed devices in your ecosystem that are placed on other parts of the globe. 

Fusing an already impressive piece of kit with machine learning results in something truly impressive: Edge AI. Edge AI brings in faster decision making, vast improvements to UX and is more energy efficient than other data management tools. Processing data can now be done in real time, so why is there still scepticism about adopting edge AI? Why haven't more businesses adopted it already? 

Joining us in this EM360 podcast is Dan Warner, CEO and Co-Founder of LGN; an organisation dedicated to bringing new edge technology to a wider audience. 

Email is the front door into an organisation and humans typically manage it. However, with phishing attacks becoming more targeted and sophisticated, and increasing cases of account takeover and data loss due to a successful email attack, humans alone can no longer be relied on to protect the inbox. Fortunately for businesses, there are email security solutions - Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies - that can help.

Join Dr Eric Cole, CEO and Founder of Secure Anchor Consulting, and Mariana Pereira, Director at Darktrace, as they discuss email security and why organisations now, more than ever, need to treat it as a top priority. In this podcast, the pair explore how to secure enterprise inboxes with AI. Mariana leads the conversation by sharing her knowledge and expertise on the current threat landscape for email in 2021, the use of AI in email security, and the key factors decision-makers should consider when determining the best AI system. The discussion ends with a look at a real-life case study of an email attack autonomously stopped by AI.

Want to learn more? Check out our recent Q&A with Mariana on how Antigena Email can create a self-defending inbox.

One of the biggest problems when managing data is that vast quantities of it is scattered across data silos and multiple systems. The primary issue this causes is the inability to shape your business to your customers' demands. What's often forgotten about is that when that data also has transactional information, it becomes hard to monitor suspicious activities from within your business. This is where money laundering becomes a fear.

Regularly, industries rely on legacy systems, however this has proved ineffective as over $2 trillion is laundered every year. Financial sectors spend over $180 billion on anti-money laundering capabilities to catch less than 1% of the financial criminals responsible. 66% of this is spent on staff and with the volume of transactions increasing exponentially, it's easy to understand that simply scaling teams to manually trawl through this data is unsustainable. Increasingly, financial organisations are looking to new technologies to provide assistance. 

The key is to invest in the right kind of anti money laundering (or AML) software, but how do you know where to start? In this podcast, Chief AI Officer at Napier Luca Primerano and CTO of Napier Nick Portalski talk about the problems with modern approaches to AML, the potential of AI as a solution to problems in the compliance space and what the future of AML looks like. 

2020 was comprised of big data breaches, leaks and new obstacles, leading to what many have dubbed a "Cybersecurity Pandemic." Surviving in these difficult times has been hard and more often than not, it's the people that suffer; in fact, 58% of breaches in the last year involved some level of personal data. The Cybersecurity Pandemic has affected so many people and organisations that the worldwide cybercrime spending is estimated to reach $6 trillion this year, a sharp increase from $1 trillion in the year before. 

In this EM360 podcast, we spoke to Raghu Nandakumara of Illumio about the best ways to navigate around this cybersecurity pandemic, the importance of the Zero Trust Model and the best ways to mitigate the impact of high-profile breaches in 2021. 

Technology as a service is a methodological approach that seeks to place the importance of the customer's need at the forefront of the software. The world of Unified Communications saw the breakthrough of Unified Communications as a Service (or UCaaS) in around 2014 and it has since managed to leverage cloud technology to send requests and communicate across hybrid workplaces. The key with cloud technology, as always, is to simply and unify, but how does UCaaS allow organisations to achieve this goal?

Explaining the ins and outs of UCaaS is Anthony Cummings, Director of Infrastructure and Operations at Frank Recruitment. In this episode, Anthony gives us the basics in UCaaS 101, the advantages and use cases of it and the way it works in hybrid workplaces to support employees and business leaders alike.