Virtual Conference
About the Event:
On February 10th, 2021, C5 Capital CEO and Founder André Pienaar joined industry leaders and peers for an informative discussion on how the pandemic changed the risk parameters for PE firms as they guard against advanced cyber threats. The PEWlive Technology Summit highlighted how digitisation and the adoption of new technologies are shaping the world of private equity from an operational and an investment perspective, at a time of rapid and transformational change. The event featured a series of panels and presentations over two days – covering issues such as the impact of technological innovation for GPs and LPs across deal sourcing, due diligence, portfolio monitoring, fund-raising, and operational business management.
Featured Speakers:
André Pienaar, Chief Executive and Founder, C5 Capital
Catherine Parry, Founder and CEO, DeepView
George Ralph, Managing Director, RFA
James Williams, Editor in Chief, PrivateEquityWire (moderator)
“Assessing the cybersecurity landscape“
The pandemic has brought transformative change to the cybersecurity threat landscape and the cybersecurity industry itself. The shift to remote working arrangements greatly expanded surface attack vectors, and we observed a huge uptick in the activity and efficacy of opportunistic cyber criminals across industries.
Phishing campaigns tended to focus on leveraging citizen interest in health and safety updates by impersonating a high-profile non-profit organisations and public health organisations. We also noted an uptick in the volume of ransomware attacks targeting commercial businesses and government organisations. By blending attacks with extortion techniques, ransomware attacks have also become data breaches, bringing significant regulatory implications to their targets. There have been so many unique security challenges created by the broad shift to WFH, as our global corporate networks became disaggregated, and the number of endpoints significantly increased. Most companies experienced disruption to network security business practices, and many increased their investments into endpoint protection in response.
Now roughly one year into the global pandemic, panelists looked back on the landscape of change in the cybersecurity. Key issues of concern included how to effectively prevent ransomware attacks and data leakage, particularly given the growing role of privacy regulation. According to Gartner, by 2023, 65% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations, up from 10% in 2020. In today’s landscape, it is more important than ever for General Partners to ensure that their portfolio companies are resilient to increased cyber threats as a matter of enterprise risk management and continued alpha. We came away from the panel with a shared view to the growing pre-eminence of privacy-enhancing technologies to build more resilient businesses, and a more resilient future.
To watch the full panel discussion, visit the following:
