Since the beginning of the pandemic, the spike of cybercrime brought the attention of businesses to the need to strengthen their cybersecurity strategy. Three entrepreneurs of La French Tech Singapore – YesWeHack, Dathena and Webdrone – share the trends they see in their domains: digital tools security, data privacy and intellectual property.
Kevin Gallerin
Managing Director APAC, YesWeHack
YesWeHack offers companies an innovative approach to cybersecurity with Bug Bounty (pay-per-vulnerability discovered), connecting more than 15 000 cyber-security experts (ethical hackers) with organizations to secure their websites, mobile apps, infrastructure, and connected devices.
When the epidemic started, we as a team went through different stages in our perception of the crisis. It started with denial – we were sure that the situation will go back to normal soon. When the lockdowns started being announced through the globe, we were sure that the impact would be limited and continued our business as usual. That’s when our customers’ behaviour changed that we realized that our old methods won’t work and that we need to adapt our tactic.
The majority of our clients had to put on freeze the projects already running or about to be launched. So we reflected on how can we help them and decided to pay it forward offering our help. For some, who suddenly had more spare time, we could deepen the work we do for them. Some others had new needs in this unprecedented situation, like the shortage of laptops to allow their teams to work remotely. We saw similar problems that our clients and prospects were facing and offered help by connecting them. Sometimes it led to finding positive solutions, sometimes it simply reassured them to talk to peers. These new networks created a new dynamic with a positive side effect: facilitating the adoption of new technologies.
Now that the economies pick up, our clients speed up the projects to compensate for the time they lost. Many also want to enlarge the scope of projects going in Bug Bounty, for example, testing some apps that they were considering secure enough or less essential yesterday.
A couple of weeks ago, we were contacted by the National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSSI) to test the StopCovid application, the French equivalent of TraceTogether. To us, it is a great recognition: sometimes seen as an unconventional approach in the past, Bug Bounty is now acknowledged as one of the proven cybersecurity solutions.
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Eléonore Ferreyrol-Alesi
Head of Client Solutions, Dathena
Our company offers data privacy and security solutions. Before Covid started, we could see a similar traction coming for both use cases. Over the past few months, demand for data security solutions has significantly increased, driven by arising challenges and new business priorities for our clients: reduce cost, manage risk and enable a secure remote workplace.
The slowdown in global economy places huge pressure on spending ability, while at the same time, with distributed remote working becoming the new normal, information risk increases exponentially. Now that organizations’ working arrangements may have permanently shifted, there is a more and more considerations about the long-term strategies of recalibrating security operations, controls and processes in place.
This growing interest in data security is coming from both MNCs and small and medium businesses (SMB) globally. Also, companies want now to accelerate their transition to the cloud, this has become one of the key topics of discussion given the current context.
Having easily-implemented solutions allowing us to reduce the deployment time to two weeks, and providing guidance to address their immediate challenges, resonated well with our clients. Surprisingly, on some aspects, project implementation has got facilitated by the crisis. We could more easily reunite decision-makers at the clients’ side. Once the project approved, training was facilitated too. For one of our clients, we conducted a webinar for 90 employees in one shot, instead of several sessions in normal time.
As a software company, we have strong culture to build partnerships with local actors to better address specific needs related to local regulations, and to operationalise the platform with our customers. With the crisis, many of our clients felt how urgent it was to transform their IT systems and processes internally and needed to make these changes fast. We accelerated our managed services offering to be able to answer quickly to our immediate customers’ needs. Our practice mostly focuses on supporting them in their cloud migration project, implement the needed controls to ensure a secure remote workplace, and a cost-efficient data security solution. Our approach is still to continue to onboard and enable more partners, in Asia, Australia, US and Europe – timing has slowed down this onboarding but are still in progress.
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Emilie Philippe
APAC General Director, WebDrone
WebDrone is an operational analysis platform that automates online investigations across clear, deep & dark web. Our virtual eDrones crawl all layers of the Internet embarking based on research criteria, law enforcement experience and turn the data collected to actionable intelligence reports. With COVID and circuit breaker, people use more Internet including social networks, marketplaces and online services, so online data increases! During this period, we keep up and even continue to develop our business due to a surge in the risk of counterfeit goods such as pharmaceutical, F&B, electronics devices…
Indeed, these past few years, the brand & products protection online has been an ever-growing need with the growth of ecommerce as 70% of counterfeits are sold online. Customers want to be better informed and a healthy way of life becomes their priority. They are willing to purchase more quality products and brands. In that context, the protection of intellectual property and its reputation become key to maintain that trust from the customers.
Intellectual property theft involves robbing people or companies of their ideas, inventions, and creative expressions — known as “intellectual property” — which can include everything from trade secrets and proprietary products and parts to movies, music, and software. WebDrone provides strong support to B2B software companies with their anti-piracy solution too. It is a growing threat, especially with the rise of digital technologies and Internet file sharing networks. Intellectual property theft causes legitimate businesses billions of dollars loss in revenue and damages reputations. Consumer prices go up, product safety is reduced… so we should act and stop it.