Speaking at the Check Point Experience conference in Vienna, Check Point founder and CEO Gil Shwed reflected on the first 25 years of the company, saying it had “come a long way” in protecting the internet.
Shwed said that the company's first few years were spent “trying to convince people on the power of the internet and I'm glad we insisted and stayed the course and took Check Point to where it is” as while the internet was “something only geeks knew about” 25 years ago, now it is the fabric that connects the entire world.
Looking at some detection statistics, Shwed said that in 2018 Check Point blocked over 100 million unknown attacks, and its Threatcloud managed security service monitored 86 billion indicators of compromise per day. However, Shwed added that statistics show that companies are spending 11% more on security, and the results were worse.
Shwed highlighted three challenges for security:
- Too much focus on a detection mentality, as “we cannot deal with detection, as if you detect it is already too late.” He argued that “the heart of security” is fighting with millions of bots, and “we cannot run as fast and chase automatic bots” so we need a prevention mentality
- Five generations of attacks: virus, networks, applications, payload and now “gen five” which involves targeted and large scale attacks using multi-vector methods with technology which is “commercial and government grade.” Shwed said that most people are still only really prepared for the second and third attack generations (network and application attacks)
- Too much complexity. Shwed pointed at 16 common attack vectors and 26 technology categories. “Next year there will be 10 new vectors and three more technologies,” he said, adding that this will mean that the complexity will double in the next few years and to solve it, “you will need to be super sophisticated and smarter than Einstein.”
This led Shwed to determine that security needs to be “turned upside down,” and this has led to new Check Point strategies around embedded open source security, as in the next generation of security there will be a major growth in the number of assets used.
“We are moving into the next generation of cyber-attack to generation six, and we need to address one to five and six, and the key ingredient is to simplify and consolidate cybersecurity and fill the holes,” he said.
“What we build today must be ready for the next wave of attacks, and [we must] build architectures to stay ahead and be ahead of attackers.”