Geopolitical, Economic Uncertainty

CF: How are things like the war in Ukraine and economic uncertainty impacting customers and partners’ cybersecurity needs?

Kapur: The geopolitical environment has everybody on guard. We have customers that have massive amounts of intellectual property. We have customers that are sensitive in different ways. So everyone is … on high alert. And it goes back to the kind of attacks that I was talking about. When attackers are getting into your network, you don’t even know they’re there. You don’t know what they’re going to do or when they’re going to do it. So there’s definitely that level of awareness and people are concerned in this environment. Even attacks on physical infrastructure in countries and other things that have already taken place. So there is that heightened attention there. And then we also have situations where customers might have been deployed in environments where it became riskier for them to have operations, and they’ve had to move their operations very quickly out of that, and they’ve turned to us to help them do it. So there is that heightened awareness for sure right now.

Skipper: We just recently had another report come out, the Global Incident Response Threat Report. It was a survey of industry professionals from the security perspective. They have seen heightened attack vectors since January. We also have seen the resurrection of Emotet, which is a botnet. So that has been resurrected and it has been used against the West. And one of those areas is hermetic wiper. We saw that come out in the late January-February time frame. That came from the Ukraine. And that hermetic wiper was specifically meant to wipe everything. They didn’t want a ransom. They just wanted to take it off. We’ve seen an increase of unknown vulnerabilities in zero days in 2021 alone. If you take a look as an example, last Christmas it was log4j. That’s the skeleton key across network. We don’t know anybody that has not been impacted by log4j. So all of those combined, we are absolutely seeing an increase in adversary activities. And as an example, since January alone, VMware Contexa is telling us that we’ve seen over 75 million exploit attempts against log4j, by far the highest that we’ve seen across any other attack vector.