It was Safety Detectives’ Aviva Zacks’ pleasure to speak to Chrysostomos Psaroudakis, IT Director and Quality Assurance Manager of Creative People, and find out what he loves and hates about cybersecurity.
Safety Detectives: Tell me about your journey in cybersecurity.
Chrysostomos Psaroudakis: My experience in cybersecurity goes back almost 20 years now. We have seen everything from viruses going from diskette to diskette, to the first malware being spread around over email, to ransomware.
SD: What do you love about cybersecurity?
CP: It is a constant. It’s a river that never stands still. It runs all the time. Although it makes me happy that it is a moving thing, a moving science, sometimes it really comes to tell you that you are tired, that you need some sleep, you need to move on, maybe change jobs, but you still do it. I do not know, maybe it is a virus itself as everything else in IT.
SD: What are some of the most popular products that your company offers?
CP: We love pfSense, and we strongly endorse it. pfSense is an open-source firewall and routing solution. It has the ability to support multi-home environments, site-to-site VPNs, or VPN connections over open-VPN. I think it’s a very, very good solution. It’s a bit strange when it comes to upgrading but if you know the product well, it’s a good thing to have in your armament repository.
SD: What types of verticals use your services?
CP: We are not into a specific sector; we help companies of different sectors. They can be either services like legal services and construction services, or commercial businesses like chemical, B2B businesses, box-moving services, and logistics. We’re not focused on one.
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
CP: The worst threats are those that target users, including the administrators. If you have the user, then you have the network. There is a shift—in the past, attackers were attacking systems. Nobody attacks a system now unless he wants to make a denial of service. They are attacking users. And the system vulnerabilities throughout the years have somehow gotten diminished. As IT evolves and as our science goes further, we have new products that have vulnerabilities, but experience is like a building. We are not in a place to say that our society is prepared for something like that. Most of the users are still treating their computers as if they are not that important. And they have the same opinion about security, “Come on, it will never happen to me.”
You cannot educate all the people simultaneously all over the globe. That’s impossible. We are talking about different kinds of people, different ages, different perceptions about IT, and different perceptions about their computers and their keyboards. They like Macs, they like PCs. There is diversification on that. So you cannot educate them all at the same time. It’s very, very tough. And that’s why there is space.
SD: Could you tell me where do you think cybersecurity is headed now that we’re living through this pandemic?
CP: Mostly on securing channels of communication between the user and the organization, access and control, who is who, logging of user actions, when did this user log in, when did he log out, what did he do, what did he change. Is he okay to go there or is permitted to view this information? It is mandatory to make users “part” of the cybersecurity team and engage them in the “protection” process. Therefore. remote endpoints should be “enhanced” and educating users in understanding the importance of what they do and how vulnerable this remote way of work can be is the key to this cybersecurity endeavor. Systems can become smarter and easier to use, but they will always need users to operate them, thus investing in them is more important than ever.