A decade has surpassed us and we are in the dawn of starting a new one. The new decade in this age of technology, without a doubt, would be something out of the futuristic movies we saw back in the ’90s. We can proudly say that the future is finally here.

So, without further ado, here are the several tech trend predictions that we have gathered for the year 2020.

Cybersecurity is taking a new level

Cybersecurity’s narrative has always been led by the “fear of breach” more than any other potential facets it has in store. This was largely due to multiple global incidents that we have seen on the news; one being the infamous case of misleading posts to be approved and circulated on Facebook as ads targeted to its billions of users.

But 2020 will be the beginning of a change in narrative for cybersecurity. We can expect to “see an increased focus on cyber resilience and how the availability and integrity of systems and data underpin the digital organisations many institutions have become”, as Richard Watson, EY Asia-Pacific Cybersecurity Risk Advisory Leader, shares.

According to recently released EY’s The Forrester Wave: Cybersecurity Consulting Services In Asia Pacific, organisations will keep a close eye on how regulators will respond to those big cyber incidents following the go-live of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Harsh punishments and penalties will prompt Asia Pacific companies to get an understanding of their GDPR readiness posture.

Also Read: Welcoming 2020: How IoT will transform everything enterprises know today

With 5G is on the horizon for some Asian countries, multi-cloud and IoT adoption is expected to follow suit –and not without security risks. According to Sandeep Bhargava, Managing Director of Asia Pacific/Japan, Rackspace, besides providing a wider potential attack surface for hackers, multi-cloud can also cause organisations to be more vulnerable to insider threats.

“For instance, the increased complexity of the IT environment due to multi-cloud adoption might lead to poor configuration management. Having more business users using the cloud also poses a challenge as not everyone fully understands cloud security risks and knows how to mitigate them,” Bhargava adds.

A recent report by Symantec found that some users may exhibit risky behaviours in the cloud such as oversharing cloud files or not storing sensitive data properly in the cloud – all of which may lead to data loss.

Rackspace added that to minimise cloud risks, organisations will need to have a multi-layered security strategy that can provide detection, response, and remediation when their IT environment is in jeopardy. Their Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) will also need to work across more departments in 2020 to ensure that security is not overlooked when innovative solutions and new business processes are introduced.

More people will recognise the value of cryptocurrency

On a related note, Facebook could eventually launch its digital currency Libra in 2020. Watson adds, “I think this has a great historical significance and may even become a landmark of the blockchain industry. Libra has established a relatively positive image for the blockchain industry in the short term.”

Libra has managed to reduce the regulatory pressure on the entire industry to some extent and has also improved the working environment of the blockchain industry.

With Facebook’s large user base in the internet industry, Libra has the potential to bring a large number of new users to the blockchain industry. Libra can also be regarded as a type of stablecoins.

In addition to that, Central Bank digital currencies could eventually become a reality in the near future. Approaching this possibility with a positive mentality, Central Bank digital currencies in themselves are also types of stablecoins.

Compared to traditional banks and fiat currencies, blockchain-based stablecoins can make payments faster, cheaper, and smoother, which is also one of the main applications of blockchain. “It shows the recognition of blockchain at the national level, which is positive for the industry, and more people will realise the value of cryptocurrencies,” said Haipo Yang, CoinEx’s CEO, in an interview with LearnBonds.

When it comes to Bitcoin, the concept remains working as before with a rising price. However, Bitcoin’s higher portion of total crypto market capitalisation means that other currencies are lacking attention and their prices are falling, which is the signal of a bear market.

In contrast, the lower the Bitcoin’s portion, the hotter the overall cryptocurrency market. “So in my point of view, the alt season will only come when Bitcoin’s portion begins to drop,” said Yang.

Decentralised peer-to-peer Exchange (DEX) to become more significant

Decentralised peer-to-peer Exchange (DEX) is an exchange run by code that exists as a decentralised application (DApp). It is a place where people can trade cryptocurrencies directly without a middleman.

According to Yang, at present, almost all blockchain exchanges are centralised, which is believed to be the biggest bug in this field. “Blockchains are known for decentralisation, but the entire ecosystem is heavily dependent on centralised exchanges, which is ironic,” Yang added.

Also Read: How China’s Greater Bay Area initiative will create a testbed for AI and decentralised tech industry

DEX is clearly the evolutionary direction of the blockchain exchange, and DEX will reshape the exchange industry through decentralisation.

In DEX, users are in charge of their own private keys. DEX can support the issuance and trading of thousands or even more tokens to meet the needs of future industry development.

“Through decentralised governance and operation, DEX has no single point of failure and takes on more vitality,” said Yang.

5G and its new tech implications

The year 2020 will be the moment for 5G to play and stay.

It is necessary to complement IoT advancements, as Watson points out. “5G itself is an attractive asset for telecom operators to offer with enterprises that have started to invest in the technology.”

“5G will lead to a rapid increase in the number of connected devices and will lower latency, therefore augmenting the capabilities that IoT offers,” Watson adds.

The presence of 5G, simultaneously, will also become solutions in the area of cybersecurity such as using AI for cyber strategy in monitoring regular management of newly introduced technology, as well as assess the cyber-physical risks they could bring. It can also create more resilient technology platforms that have the ability to predict attacks before they occur.

To date, South Korea and China have rolled out 5G networks, while Australia, Japan, and Singapore plans to do so next year, in predictions shared by Rackspace.

5G rollout will be beneficial especially for the manufacturing, retail, transportation, and government sectors, as they adopt IoT to become more connected. 5G’s low-latency, high bandwidth network will enable far-away sensors to instantly share updates about the connected devices, therefore enabling real-time processing.

“This will, in turn, drive the demand for edge computing as data can be immediately processed near where the data is generated, instead of in a centralised data-processing warehouse. Edge computing can also help reduce operational costs. It reduces the bandwidth needs as data is mostly processed locally, and only the relevant data gets transmitted to the central data repository,” says Bhargava.

Also Read: Mobile is the US$120B future of tech business, report by App Annie

Another sector that may benefit from the arrival of 5G is video games. Watson also shares that cloud gaming and 5G technology represents an opportunity for the industry as companies can harness these new technologies to edge out competitors to prevent slowing growth.

“There has been an increase in expenditure on boosting cybersecurity compliance, as well as in the tech infrastructure needed to support blockchain is being utilised as a solution to encourage trust throughout the video gaming ecosystem,” says Watson based on the result of a survey conducted by EY.

All-cloud data storage and its management

More businesses will shift their operations to the cloud and deploy data-intensive workloads with higher supercomputing footprint. According to Pure Storage’s predictions, to support these workloads, more renewable forms of data sustainability and emerging techniques will arise to make processing more energy efficient.

However, as applications are developed or re-platformed for cloud-friendly architectures, Object Storage will become the natural choice for enabling applications to decouple and disaggregate applications and their computed resources from a pool of shared storage.

Still from Pure Storage’s predictions, subscription business models will see a spike in the new decade.

In addition to that, fueling the growth for modern analytics will become more affordable infrastructure options such as more powerful CPUs, consumption-based infrastructure, available both on-prem and in the public cloud, and lower-priced flash memory. “The unbridled growth of data sources including smart devices (smart home, wearables, connected cars, industrial internet, etc.) will drive the adoption of modern analytics in order to drive more insights,” said Matthew Oostveen, Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific & Japan, Pure Storage.

All in all, multi-cloud will become the preferred IT foundation for more organisations as they seek to become more agile to keep up with the digital disruption.

“For multi-cloud to deliver value, it needs to be integrated, support DevOps, and scale services to meet variable workload demands. Recognising this, some cloud giants have introduced solutions – such as AWS Outpost, Azure Arc, and Google Anthos – that can ensure consistent development and operations experience across on-premise, private and public clouds,” Bhargava adds.

As the competition among cloud hyperscalers to become the provider of choice heats up, the team at Rackspace believes that more of such unified, hybrid/multi-cloud tools will be rolled out next year.

AI-driven everything

Pure Storage also added that AI will go from advisory roles to an automated action as customers want to take the backseat.

“Organisations will be more open to AI making decisions for them,” Oostveen added.

Ronen Mense, President & Managing Director, APAC at AppsFlyer added: “We are finally going to see some solid impact out of Artificial and Augmented Intelligence. It may possibly be first felt in the logistics and supply chain sector, paving the way for a new category called Logitech (not to be confused with the brand).”

Singapore, for example, has geared up with its National AI Strategy, publicly announced during the Singapore Fintech Festival in November.

Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat shared that the new strategy details how Singapore is set to develop and use AI to transform the economy and improve peoples’ lives.

Also Read: Infographic: Why the future of consumer goods lies in the use of AI

“The government has committed more than S$500 million (US$368 million) to fund AI activities under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2020 (RIE2020) plan,” Heng said.

The launch of the latest national AI strategy targeted at developing the AI ecosystem in Singapore is a part of the nation’s ongoing Smart Nation initiative. Singapore will embark on the plan by kickstarting projects in key high-value sectors and building a holistic AI ecosystem.

The National AI Strategy has three objectives that include Singapore becoming a global hub for developing, test-bedding, deploying, and scaling AI solutions, as well as learning how to govern and manage the impact of AI.

With Singapore as APAC’s corridor pledged to be an “AI-fied” nation, we can only imagine what would entail for the rest of the region in the next decade.

We are going to see more early-stage funding round being announced in the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem, particularly seed funding news.

At least, this is the direction that we began to see towards the end of this year. In the various interviews that e27 has done this year, we have seen investors expressing their interest in focussing on early-stage investments.

The latest of such kind of conversation was this one we had with Vertex Holdings on their new fund; CEO Chua Kee Lock stated that early-stage investing “will remain a robust asset class for the foreseeable future.”

The privacy-led customer journey for Gen Z

There are also other digital spheres that we think may see growth, such as the use of hyper-personalisation technology and the rise of a new era of social media such as TikTok, driven by its vast users, Generation Z.

We need to also factor that the next decade will see Generations Z as the dominant consumers that grow with technology and grown by technology, with them entering multiple stages of their lives, forcing products and services to adjust to their needs.

“With 2019 became a milestone year for data privacy and transparency, many big tech players introduced features that give consumers more control over how and when their data is collected and used. To capitalise on the positive impact this has on consumers, we can expect brands, marketers, and developers to increasingly look beyond their traditional marketing tech stack to inform their 2020 campaigns and business objectives with anonymised data throughout the customer journey,” Mense adds.

Mobile gaming reaches a new height of quality

Besides Gen Z leading the way, mobile gaming is another big disruptor this year that is predicted to continue to gain massive popularity for the coming years. In the State of Gaming App Marketing 2019 report released by AppsFlyer, it is stated that hyper-casual will make way for hybrid-casual mobile games, as players demand better quality and deeper gameplay, which means fewer ads and players are willing to pay for the experience.

The report also shared the potential of India as the next big frontier. It already has the building blocks such as a massive young population; smartphone penetration expected to reach 32 per cent in 2020; cheapest, accessible mobile data; and with more than 200 homegrown world-class gaming studios making India their home.

Also Read: How learning like babies can be the future of AI?

Besides the seven tech trend predictions mentioned, AppsFlyer also added that the new decade will thwart fintech to a whole other level, with it continues to disrupt the banking system.

“Traditional institutions will be scrambling if they aren’t already. Those who don’t keep up will be left behind in the new decade,” Mense adds.

To close up the predictions, Mense says, “There has been a consolidation of media sources in the past 24 months with inefficient players unable to be competitive with the big players.  We have reached an inflex point where the industry will start to open up, kind of like an hourglass, and we will see the likes of Bytedance, Amazon and true programmatic step up and fill the dire need of the market to be more competitive and cost-efficient.”

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Was edge computing the death of IoT? Did research drive the blockchain hype or vice versa? How has the WeWork debacle affected the appetite for sharing economy projects?

As founders looking to raise series A funding, we had more than a casual interest in investment trends. While most founders can get an intuitive sense of the market through personal contacts and media coverage, we wanted to try a more scientific approach.

Using our text analysis software, Lexikat, we sorted and analysed ten years’ worth of data from the Factiva media database.

The results might surprise you…like they did us.

Hunt for the next big thing

We used our own software to pick out the keywords and phrases used in articles about tech startups and separated them by sector. We then combed through ten years of media data to search for the key trends in each field, counting the number of articles mentioning these topics as a proportion of the total number mentioning startups.

Conclusion: the generalist press is a pretty good indicator of investor sentiment. Mentions of blockchain, for example, peaked during the 2018 Bitcoin boom, while interest in IoT projects began to decline as edge computing gained ground.

Also read: The 10 most read blockchain e27 Contributor articles

One place where these trends were not reflected was tech-focused media. Wired, for example, was almost entirely unaffected by trends elsewhere, focusing instead on sectors that can be relied upon to appeal to affluent geeks: gaming, robots, the environment…

Ni hao China!

Different language markets also showed different trends. Having dealt with both the English and Chinese markets for our own software, we were keen to see a statistical comparison of the two.

Unsurprisingly, Chinese media responded less strongly to the Bitcoin spike: while China has millions of crypto speculators, the government is ambivalent about blockchain technology, and the topic receives limited coverage in the mainstream press.

On the other hand, big data topics attracted much more interest among Chinese media outlets than in their English-language counterparts. This is probably largely down to coverage of the Chinese government’s use of big data in projects such as the social credit system.

Indeed, when it comes to market sentiment, zone boundaries seem to be determined by language as much as by geography (if not more). Asia-based English-language publications tend to reflect trends in the wider English-speaking world. Deal Street Asia and E27, for example, aligned more closely with English trends than Chinese ones.

Could there be future possibilities for arbitrage between the two markets? Stay tuned…

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Keeping oneself motivated and constantly updated with new trends, thy name is entrepreneurship. And if there is one habit that helps startup founders stay inspired is reading.

An avid reader myself, I scanned the bookshelves of many founders for a peek into what they were reading in 2019 that helped them stay on track.

Everybody’s Business by Jon Miller and Lucy Parker

– Maxim Chernuschenko, CEO and co-founder of Cashwagon

This book, though it’s marketed as “how big businesses can fix the world”, is truly insightful especially with so much resonance with both my personal life and business. Especially in a work setting and the changing business landscape, I use it often to check myself when making decisions. The key takeaways the authors brought to light was of making a positive impact, something we often overlook and forget.

With Cashwagon, this is one of our founding philosophies and hold true till today– providing an alternative financing option and serving the needs of the underbanked in SEA instead of focusing on our own interest. Following the journey of mega corporations out there, we hope to continue harnessing technology and innovation to make a positive impact on society.

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

– Benjamin Wong, Co-founder and CEO of Transwap

It is a must-read for first-time entrepreneurs and a revision for serial entrepreneurs. The Lean Startup reminds us to create a vision and take a leap towards it. It also shows the approach of building a product, testing your proposition in the market to see if the idea has been validated and adapting to consumers’ feedback – in all, how to steer your startup in the right direction and accelerate to grow.

Play Bigger: How Rebels and Innovators Create New Categories and Dominate Markets by Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney

– David Wong, CEO, Booqed

Product-market fit is a common concept in the startup world. In fact, the inability to find a product-market fit is identified as a major reason why startups fail. However, this book suggests that creating a great product isn’t enough, arguing that companies must create whole new “categories” that destroy old ones.

For example, Uber created a new category, personal transportation – disrupting the taxi industry in the process. Airbnb’s category is community-based hospitality, which is disrupting the traditional hotel industry.

As a startup founder, the idea that creating a great company also means designing and building a legendary category is both highly thought-provoking and challenging. This book shows entrepreneurs how to define, develop and dominate a category over time.

Also Read: Why speed reading too many books will not make you successful

The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni

– Lukasz Orlowski, Co-founder, and CTO, Archanan

It changed my way of thinking about building effective teams and working with people.

The book is split into two parts. The first one is a leadership fable that sets a context in a manner relatable to every entrepreneur and/or a business owner.

The second one outlines a framework based on four principles showcased in part one. I managed to effectively incorporate those principles into Archanan’s existing culture and management style, which (measurably) increased the efficiency of my team by 20-25 per cent!

I communicate with the team and I understand the team much better ever since I started applying what I learned in the book.

Dare to Lead by Brenè Brown

– Anastasia Volkova, CEO and Founder, FluroSat

This book offers practical tips to help leaders empower their teams by leaning in and inviting the real conversation in times of change and challenge. Must-read for a modern-day leader.

Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do by Carl J Schramm

– Nickolas Rekeda, CMO, MGID

A practical look at creating a startup based on real-life cases and data, this book really resonated with me because I launched a startup myself, and experienced many of the common mistakes that entrepreneurs make in the early days of their business – such as trying to save money by not hiring professionals. It changed the way I think by making me realise that as entrepreneurs and business people, we all go through the same mistakes, and can only grow by learning from them.

It was truly open and honest, it was a celebration of supposed errors and a nod to all the business people who have succeeded through their toughest entrepreneurial times.

MGID also began as a startup, and it reminded me that we have deliberately retained some entrepreneurial qualities at the heart of our business, even after eleven years in the market – openness to new challenges, readiness to risk and experiment, and team management. These qualities are also essential to businesses operating in the technology sector; with our industry rapidly changing all the time, we must be agile and adaptable.

Also Read: Venture Capital Book Club: Why I make my VC team read books

Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

– Vladyslav Yatsenko, Cofounder, Revolut

I’d say it helped me to structure a bit more and confirmed, not changed, the way I think. It’s great because it’s true, it’s about real life, not like some targeted academic research (what is called “scientism” in the book).”

The post Good reads: Business books that influenced startup founders in 2019 appeared first on e27.

In the previous part of this series, we talked about how WeWork’s failure to get publicly listed had pushed for change in the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem. As investors and the public began to be critical of a tech company’s valuation and ability to make profits –as any ‘real’ business should– startups might find themselves being under tight scrutiny.

This, as we may have noticed the last quarter of 2019, had led to several leading startups to include profitability as part of their New Year’s resolutions.

The year 2019 also saw greater collaboration between the tech community and other industries. As part of its effort to diversify its portfolio (and drive profitability), venture capital (VC) firms were also investing in sectors such as hospitality and F&B.

In this episode, we are going to focus on the key elements of the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem itself: The people who are running it and the influence that they can have.

All eyes on founders

A few years ago, I went to a demo day event in Jakarta that had 500 Startups Managing Partner Khailee Ng as a keynote speaker. In his speech, Ng likened running a startup today with “watching a spectator sport.”

Also Read: Tech powerhouse taps into the Southeast Asian ecosystem’s pool of startups

Like football games, audience gathers in a venue to see their favourite startups pitching. Also, like in football games, they comment on startup founders’ presentation and make bets on who is going to come out as first prize winner.

The startup community also produces a number of its own celebrities –very much like football players.

Like athletes who branch out to become business people or fashion models, these startup founders also find that their presence was needed in places other than tech.

After covering the Indonesian startup ecosystem for more than three years, I can tell you how the local media portrayed startup founders, particularly those of major companies such as Tokopedia or gojek. The coverage is often overwhelmingly positive: Founders are being lauded for their youth and potentials. They are seen as heroes who are set to make a positive impact on society. Think young Anakin Skywalker before he turns into the dark side, or Tom Riddle when he still had his nose intact.

These potentials did not go unnoticed by the authority.

Rise to power

I have been covering the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem for almost five years and I can tell you some moments that I am going to carry with me forever. One of them is when Nadiem Makarim was announced by President Joko Widodo as Indonesia’s new minister of education and culture.

Also Read: gojek-backer Samsung Ventures invests in Indonesian proptech startup Travelio, to focus more in Southeast Asian startups

Apparently his success in disrupting one sector has led him to be trusted with disrupting another.

Startup founders entering public service does not happen exclusively in Indonesia. In Malaysia, three startup founders had been appointed to the National Economic Action Council (NEAC). In Thailand, former StockRadars managing partner Pakornwut Udompipatskul had won a local election and is leaving the company to focus on public service.

Even in the US, Democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang is one example of presidential hopefuls with a background in tech entrepreneurship.

The next decade

There are many reasons to be happy about this development. For the millennial generation, this is an opportunity to get their voices represented and heard. For startup founders, this is a sign that they are having an impact beyond their everyday work in the tech industry.

So, how will the next decade look like for the Southeast Asian startup community?

What we can say for sure is that there will be more coming up.

Also Read: How fintech is disrupting the Southeast Asian payments market

Soon after Nadiem Makarim’s appointment as minister of education and culture, President Joko Widodo named two startup founders — Ruangguru’s Adamas Belva Devara and Amartha’s Andi Taufan Garuda Putra– as his presidential special staff. Apart from these people, there are also startup founders who have had enlisted themselves as members of a political party.

What remains to be seen is where this is going to happen. Our prediction is that more and more countries in the region are going to be more welcoming of startup founders becoming politicians, but we are also aware that the situation is not always that simple. There are unique barriers to entry in every market. But since startup founders had proven from time to time their ability to disrupt and innovate, we are ready to be surprised.

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Group-IB talks about threat hunting, cybercrime trends and forecasts at CyberСrimeCon 2019

When talking about cyber-threats, the first consideration one should take is that as the world is becoming data-driven and technology-based, cyber-threats are also becoming increasingly sophisticated. In one of his recent statements, Group-IB CEO and founder Ilya Sachkov said “identifying threat actors and their motivations behind a cyber attack may help law enforcers know who they are up against, but doing so publicly could backfire.”

Cyber villains are using smarter and smarter tricks to bypass security efforts and throw researchers off track. One notable example is the infamous North Korean Lazarus gang, who tried to mask their activity by pretending to be Russian-speaking hackers.

Another problem is the existing knowledge gap. Group-IB, headquartered in Singapore, believes that without a clear understanding of relevant threats, adversaries’ tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) local companies and organizations cannot build effective cyberdefense.  “Companies spend money, but they do not understand the real thing — what threats are targeting their specific company or industry in a given region,” said Ilya Sachkov, CEO and founder at Group-IB.

“Cybercrime has no borders. Cybersecurity must not have them either. This can only be guaranteed and maintained through close cross-sector collaboration and data exchange,” said Sachkov.

These are only some of the many considerations that cybersecurity professionals need to take before navigating the sensitive, and often complex nature of cyber-threats. Group-IB’s CyberCrimeCon 2019, which was held in Singapore this year, attempted to provide a platform for local cybersecurity community to bridge this gap.

Group-IB’s CyberCrimeCon 2019

The CyberCrimeCon event has two components. In the first technology stream, experts share information on cyberthreats, trends and strategies while during the strategic stream, experts offered real-life high-profile cases of cyberthreats and how they cope.

To raise awareness on cyberthreats, Group-IB released its trademark annual “Hi-Tech Crime Trends 2019/2020” report at the conference. Cybercrime trends identified from second half of 2018 to first half of 2019, industries that will become major targets of advanced threat actors, new APTs discovered over the given period and forecasts on their development in the near future were revealed.

The report also described attacks in major sectors like the energy and financial sectors. For the telecommunications industry, Group-IB described nine groups (APT10, APT33, MuddyWater, HEXANE, Thrip, Chafer, Winnti, Regin, and Lazarus) that posed a major threat and has become a target for state-sponsored attackers. This can result in customers’ surveillance or sabotage purposes.

According to the report, the number and complexity of state-sponsored hackers’ attacks have increased with at least 38 active state-sponsored APTs having been reported in the world. These threat actors’ motivation goes beyond financial gratification. Their aim is for espionage, sabotage, and destruction and their main targets are facilities essential to keep a country running.

This year’s CyberCrimeCon was also the first of its kind to open its doors to the general public. The public needs to know “it is not possible to be 100 percent protected. But it is important to move toward achieving this goal and take some simple measures that once adopted will significantly upgrade your personal security, for example, use different passwords for different social media accounts. It is also important to always keep in mind that once you released something on the Internet it is to stay there forever,” warned Sachkov.

Group-IB hopes not only to raise awareness in the region, but to actively encourage cybersecurity practices among young professional.

No sooner said than done. At the Conference, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the Group-IB and Singapore’s Institute of Technical Education (ITE). A key element of the agreement is to set up a first of its kind Threat Hunting, Digital Forensic, and Cyber Investigations Centre in ITE . The agreement aims to bring up a new generation of cybersecurity professionals in Singapore by synergizing Group-IB’s hands-on experience in fighting cybercrime globally and ITE’s unique technical education capabilities with one goal – to improve cyber resiliency of the city-state

Group-IB will set up the infrastructure for the centre so that students get real-life and hands-on experience, identifying and proactively hunting for threats relevant to the region and dealing with the ones targeting especially OT related systems.

The company will also equip the Centre with its Threat Hunting and Intelligence solutions for adversary research, malware analysis, monitoring of underground activity, and network protection. Introduction of new courses, training, and internship for ITE students at Group-IB’s offices in multiple locations to help Singapore nurture a new generation of cybersecurity professionals will also be carried out.

“Cyber threats to OT systems and the financial sector are some of the most pressing issues of today in Singapore. Raising a new generation of threat hunters now, equipped with tactical and strategic knowledge about threat actors, is the backbone of the future stability of Singapore,” said Ilya Sachkov, CEO and founder at Group-IB.

Sachkov explained, “this is an ambitious goal that we believe can be achieved by leveraging Group-IB’s experience in fighting cybercrime and ITE’s innovative approach to technical education.”

Group-IB also signed a MOU with Ngee Ann Polytechnic to increase Singapore’s cybersecurity talent pool. They will jointly develop cybersecurity curriculum, research and provide internships. NP has introduced Group-IB’s Threat Detection System Huntbox module in the Cybersecurity & Digital Forensics course to equip students with threat hunting skills and others.

Group-IB experts have trained law enforcement agencies, corporate security teams, and universities in Singapore, Bahrain, Germany, Lebanon, Monaco, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Thailand, and the United Kingdom, as well as experts within INTERPOL and Europol.

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