Data and security attacks increasing across Asia

As the number of cyber attacks in Hong Kong and across the region steadily increase, experts are warning that brands must be in a heightened state of readiness for increasingly sophisticated and disruptive hacks.Attacks on media companies, financial institutions, governments and even high profile CEO’s have, in the past, been directed towards Western organisations, but increasingly these attacks are targeting Asian institutions.Alongside economic uncertainty, cyber security was cited as one of the biggest challenges facing companies in 2015, research from Ipsos research shows.Apple Daily and Sony are two of the more recent and high-profile examples of this, but a wave of sophisticated attacks are threatening brands and individuals across many industries.“Cyber security has become the new norm these days,” Edwin Seo (pictured), regional security architect at F5 Networks, said.Seo, in Hong Kong for the launch F5’s new security product Silverline, said the opening up of the internet, the trend of storing information and data on the cloud and consumers embracing mobile, have made cyber security increasingly relevant.“Attack sizes are getting bigger and attack methods are getting more advanced. This is the new era of vigilance for cyber secutiry," he added.F5 Networks is using these issues as a stepping stone for its Silverline product, which launched in Singapore last week, ahead of a roll out in Hong Kong and Taiwan this week.F5 said it has made significant investments as part of its concerted campaign to strengthen its security support capabilities.This includes the establishment of data scrubbing center in Singapore, where cyber threats are identified and removed with little to no impact to the end user or the network.“With security and attack mitigation concerns on the rise in the region, we wanted to ensure our customers are well-positioned to defend against DDoS attacks even as they increase in scale and complexity,” said Emmanuel Bonnassie, senior vice president of sales for Asia Pacific.“This type of hybrid solution, combining on-premises DDoS (denial of service) protection capabilities with a high-capacity cloud service, provides enterprises with robust capability to absorb and mitigate a complete spectrum of DDoS attacks,” Bonnassie added.