Interview With Chrysostomos Psaroudakis – Creative People

Chrysostomos Psaroudakis, IT Director and Quality Assurance Manager of Creative People interviewed by Aviva Zacks and Safety Detectives. Let’s 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 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 and 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 this job is a virus itself making you love 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 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 help companies of different sectors. They can be 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 the ones targeting 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 and those vulnerabilities are covered rather faster comparing to the previous years to date.  Most of the users are still treating their computers as if they are not that important, and thus 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. They like Macs, they like PCs. There is diversification on that. So you cannot educate them all at the same time. It’s very hard. And that’s why there is space for such cyberthreats to be deployed.

 

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.

 

Originally posted to: safetydetectives.com