Beyond the numbers: the human side of cyber threats
1 min
"That is the ‘one AXA’ mindset. Everyone is just focused on resolving the problem..”— Bruno Laurent
A Story by Bruno Laurent, Head of Cyber Defense, AXA Group Operations
In cyber security, the question is not, Are we going to be attacked?
, because we’re attacked on a permanent basis. The question is: How deep will the attacks be and how often?
I remember a cyberattack in 2021 by a hacker group called Avaddon, which compromised some of our units in Asia. We had to act fast and isolate that sector of the company.
“Cyberattacks are on the rise. We have to constantly learn to adapt to new types of attack and protect our brand, our employees, and our customers.”
We wanted to ensure that the crisis did not spread to the rest of the group. We use the word ‘virus’ in cybersecurity for a reason - it can spread easily, as all of our different companies are interconnected. The problem was that there was a real-world virus going on at the same time. Normally I would immediately dispatch one of my most skilled IT engineers to Asia to help the team over there. But it was during Covid restrictions, and we weren’t able to travel.
We were able to manage it remotely because of the power of the group. At AXA, everyone understands the importance of the situation, and it becomes the priority for everybody. Other parts of the company accept losing some service for a period of time to support a fellow unit. That is the one AXA
mindset. Everyone is just focused on resolving the problem, protecting the reputation of AXA, the service to the customer, and their data. We have always in mind that by safeguarding data with critical and sensitive information we are protecting our customers’ privacy.
