Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen Calls for Rebalancing of Security and Business Continuity in Black Hat USA AI Summit Keynote

Chen cites recent security outages and the AI revolution as drivers for a new way of thinking

DALLAS, Aug. 5, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), a global cybersecurity leader, today announced that its CEO and Co-founder, Eva Chen, will call for the industry to commit to change following the catastrophic CrowdStrike outage, highlighting that cybersecurity should never come at the expense of business progress and continuity.

Join Eva at The AI Summit, Tuesday August 6 at 9:55am for her keynote. Location: South Pacific F, Level O at Mandalay Bay.

As the longest serving cybersecurity executive in the industry, Eva has been defending data from adversaries long before Black Hat has existed as an event. During her keynote, she will share guidance reflected in the CEO blog covering:

• unifying business goals with cybersecurity
• protecting and enabling the workforce
• protecting business intelligence to power innovation and increase productivity

Eva Chen, CEO at Trend Micro: "As ownership of cybersecurity shifted from IT operations to the SOC, the gap widened between the goals of cybersecurity and the business. The outage is symptomatic of this imbalance. Organizations and the vendor community must realign security goals to better support business continuity and deliver sustainable security and business operations. And as an industry, we need to think more creatively about how to support these requirements."

Frank Dickson, Group Vice President, Security & Trust at IDC: "The recent outages expose just how fragile our IT stack can be. "Silent patching" or "silent upgrades," where the customers often do not have the luxury of QA'ing updates are now calling into question if the implicit trust that we have with our software vendors and needs to be revisited. So too does the topic of system rollback and recovery, available in many virtualized environments. Finally, mission-critical servers are not desktop computers as should not be treated as such. Using helmets in a car or seatbelts on a motorcycle will improve your safety, but I would not bet my life on them. Protecting mission-critical servers with a solution meant for a laptop seems equally as silly." 

During her keynote at Black Hat USA, Eva will share insights gleaned from thousands of enterprise customers, highlighting a lack of alignment with the concerns of the business, irresponsible quality assurance (QA) processes, and a one-size-fits-all approach from endpoint security vendors that ultimately culminated in a global catastrophic failure.

Among global enterprises and the wider vendor community, cyber must go beyond detection to also take account of availability and continuity requirements. For many SOC teams, this journey has already begun—by framing cyber in terms of holistic business risk mitigation, organizations have worked toward unifying technical and non-IT goals.

Yet on the endpoint, there is opportunity and progress required, with most vendors persisting with rigid, single-agent approaches that can amplify business continuity risk. Endpoint, server and workloads have unique risk profiles and require specialized protection. A custom, modular agent approach as championed by Trend Micro enables IT teams to turn on (and off) a wide range of platform features—deploying what's required, where it's required and when. The result is optimized security and enhanced business resilience.

The need for industry change is even more acute as AI becomes integrated deeper into IT and business operations. Against this backdrop, Eva will share that security and business continuity must advance in lockstep or risk catastrophic events like the world recently experienced.

Certain statements included in this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are sometimes accompanied by words such as "believe," "may," "will," "estimate," "continue," "anticipate," "intend," "expect," "should," "would," "plan," "predict," "potential," "seem," "seek," "future," "outlook" and similar expressions that predict or indicate future events or trends or that are not statements of historical matters. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning the advantage of our modular agent approach, a particular updating, patching, or operational methodology, or any other strategy, method, or technology to avoid or mitigate a potentially catastrophic event. These statements are based on our current expectations and beliefs and are subject to a number of factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in our forward-looking statements are reasonable, we do not know whether our expectations will prove correct. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof, even if subsequently made available by us on our website or otherwise. We do not undertake any obligation to update, amend or clarify these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

About Trend Micro
Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend Micro's AI-powered cybersecurity platform protects hundreds of thousands of organizations and millions of individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints. As a leader in cloud and enterprise cybersecurity, Trend's platform delivers a powerful range of advanced threat defense techniques optimized for environments like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, and central visibility for better, faster detection and response. With 7,000 employees across 70 countries, Trend Micro enables organizations to simplify and secure their connected world. www.TrendMicro.com.

SOURCE Trend Micro Incorporated