Safety Detective: What has your cybersecurity journey been like and what do you love about it?
Lewis Rodger: I love that cybersecurity changes all the time and it requires us to be on our toes and always up to date. I like to make sure that I know the latest things about cybersecurity. It’s been quite a journey, especially now with cloud services taking more and more precedence, the landscape of that has changed, and you don’t physically know where data is, and so it presents a new challenge that way.
SD: What this Texaport do to help mitigate cyber threats?
LR: We help to make sure that we’re using the latest tools, and that we train all of our engineers up to make sure that they’re aware of all the latest threats. We heavily rely on a good suite of software that helps us meet all of our technical requirements, and then also provide training not only for us, but for our end users as well and how to keep them safe online. After a while, you get to a point where technical recommendations and technical implementations only go so far. But actually training the human to notice that something might not quite be right is a very important part.
SD: What verticals use your services?
LR: Small and medium enterprises are generally what we do. We do a lot of different bits of verticals, to be honest with you. We find quite often that the very basics of cybersecurity is similar across every type of company, and then specializing within that is a little bit different. But a lot of the broad strokes need to be the same no matter what you do.
SD: What does your company do to stay ahead of the competition?
LR: We heavily encourage all our engineers to do training, get new certifications, keep themselves up to date with tech news, and discuss the tools that we’re using to make sure that they’re always the best they can be, and that they’re the best ones on offer in the market.
SD: What are the worst cyberthreats out there today?
LR: I think social engineering has gone through the roof at the moment. We see so much kind of email-based spam where someone is impersonating either the CEO of an organization or that they they’re pretending to be one of your suppliers or your customers and say that their bank details have changed. There are a lot of email-based threats at the moment.
SD: Where is cybersecurity headed now that we’re living through this pandemic?
LR: It’s even more focused on the cloud and even more focused on mapping where data is, where it lives, and making sure that every device that you have is protected no matter who it’s owned by, if it’s a personal device or not. And making sure that because your data is now spread very far geographically in everyone’s houses essentially, making sure that you’ve got security controls in place for that.
