'All workers are an extension of IT,' cyber threats soar 630% while working from home: McAfee CTO

McAfee CTO Steve Grobman joins Yahoo Finance to share an exclusive report on working from home trends, rise in the use of in cloud collaboration tools, increased cyber threats and more.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOPHOROUS: Well, states are beginning to reopen their economies, but it looks like a majority of Americans are still connecting with others online. In fact, people's use of cloud collaboration tools is up 600% since we all started working from home. Here with a Yahoo Finance exclusive is McAfee Chief Technology Officer Steve Grobman. Steve, good to have you with us. I am curious what you at McAfee is seeing with regards to these connections online even outside the US. Are you seeing numbers still strong in places like Italy and China?

STEVE GROBMAN: Sure. Good morning, Alexis. So what we've really seen is the cyber threats have been following the pandemic. So as this global health crisis started in China, we saw initial activity back in February, and then that moved into Europe and then the United States. And as you mentioned, a lot of it is workers that are now working remotely that traditionally haven't done so using new platforms and really using this untrusted network that we call the internet to perform critical job functions. So we've seen not only 600% in use of cloud platforms like Zoom, Cisco, Webex, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, but we've also seen a 600% in cyber threats related to the cloud.

- Steve, do you think we're nearing a couple of big hack events? I think, to your point, we're all working from home. We're all using, I think, untested technologies or technologies we haven't used on this type of scale before. How do you think the next couple months, or even a year, will play out?

STEVE GROBMAN: So I think what we're seeing is a lot of businesses using the cloud that traditionally haven't needed to. So businesses that have been using the cloud that are well accustomed to it and have good cyber hygiene practices, things like what we call multi-factor authentication where when you sign into a cloud application, you get a text message or use a secondary application on your phone, those are actually well secured.

Where the 600% of cloud threats that we're seeing really grow is around theft of credentials, so businesses and organizations that are using things like Microsoft O 365 for business productivity but then having their cloud credentials stolen, possibly by bad actors in other countries, in order to exfiltrate company intellectual property, other sensitive information. So it's ensuring that all of the companies around the world, even those that haven't traditionally used the cloud, lean in and learn how to use these technologies safely and securely.

ALEXIS CHRISTOPHOROUS: I want to expand on that a little bit, Steve, because you talked about clean cyber security hygiene. I like the way you put that. You talked about multi-factor authentication. What are some other ways, some actionable things businesses can do to protect themselves, their workers, their data while so many of them are working from home, especially those who are not used to doing this?

STEVE GROBMAN: So one of the things that organizations and the workers need to recognize is the workers are now an extension of IT. So in a typical business environment, you have IT take care of the security of the wireless routers that are in the ceilings. They take care of the networks and the device security.

With everyone working remotely, a lot of that responsibility now falls to the workers themselves. So every worker needs to make sure they're running up-to-date firmware on their home router. They need to make sure that whatever compute device they're using in their home, whether it's a personal device or a work device, is fully up to date with good security software. Defending yourself from cyber threats is always going to be a combination of technology, but also good cyber street smarts, so recognizing that there are bad actors literally creating thousands of malicious domains every day related to the pandemic and the financial crises that we have underway and thinking twice before clicking on some of those links.

- Steve, what's the next big product you're working on at McAfee?

STEVE GROBMAN: So we're focused on a few things, and it's largely around the shift in the way that people are working. We're very focused on protecting work as it moves to the cloud. So we have a large offering that's called our Cloud Access Security Broker. That's all about being able to use the cloud safely and securely, both from those SaaS applications like O 365, but also, as businesses move to run their environment in the public cloud environments like AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure.

We're also looking at how can we protect knowledge workers from working remotely securely to ensure that not only are they protected from threats, but also that critical data isn't leaked or exfiltrated to places that it shouldn't go. And that's all around a unified cloud edge where we're using what we call a secure web SaaS environment that is all about inspecting that web traffic before it actually goes to the cloud and the internet.

- All right. Well, we'll leave it there. McAfee Chief Technology Officer Steve Grubman, have a good weekend.

STEVE GROBMAN: OK. Thanks. You too.