Sophos released a sector survey report, “The State of Ransomware in Critical Infrastructure 2024,” which revealed that the median recovery costs for two critical infrastructure sectors, Energy and Water, quadrupled to $3 million over the past year. This is four times higher than the global cross-sector median. In addition, 49% of ransomware attacks against these two critical infrastructure sectors started with an exploited vulnerability.

Data for the State of Ransomware in Critical Infrastructure 2024 report comes from 275 respondents at energy, oil and gas, and utilities organizations, which fall under the Energy and Water sectors of CISA’s 16 defined critical infrastructure sectors. The results for this sector survey report are part of a broader, vendor-agnostic survey of 5,000 cybersecurity/IT leaders conducted between January and February 2024 across 14 countries and 15 industry sectors.

“Criminals focus where they can cause the most pain and disruption so the public will demand quick resolutions, and they hope, ransom payments to restore services more quickly. This makes utilities prime targets for ransomware attacks. Because of the essential functions they provide, modern society demands they recover quickly and with minimal disruption,” said Chester Wisniewski, global Field CTO.

“Unfortunately, public utilities are not only attractive targets but vulnerable to attacks on many fronts, including the requirement for high availability and safety, as well as an engineering mindset focused on physical security. There’s a preponderance of older technologies configured to enable remote management without modern security controls like encryption and multifactor authentication. Like hospitals and schools these utilities are frequently operating with minimal staffing and without the IT staffing required to stay on top of patching, the latest security vulnerabilities and the monitoring required for early detection and response.”

On top of growing recovery costs, the median ransom payment for organizations in these two sectors jumped to more than $2.5 million in 2024—$500,0000 higher than the global cross-sector median. The Energy and Water sectors also reported the second highest rate of ransomware attacks. Overall, 67% of the organizations in these sectors reported being hit by ransomware in 2024, in comparison to the global, cross-sector average of 59%.

Other findings from the report include:

• • The energy and water sectors reported increasingly longer recovery times. Only 20% of organizations hit by ransomware were able to recover within a week or less in 2024, compared to 41% in 2023 and 50% in 2022. Fifty-five percent took more than a month to recover, up from 36% in 2023. In comparison, across all sectors, only 35% of companies took more than a month to recover
• • These two critical infrastructure sectors reported the highest rate of backup compromise (79%) and the third highest rate of successful encryption (80%) when compared to the other industries surveyed

“This once again shows that paying ransom payments almost always works against our best interests. An increasing number (61%) paid the ransom as part of their recovery, yet the amount time it took to recover was extended. Not only do these high rates and amounts of ransoms encourage more attacks on the sector, but they are not achieving the claimed goal of shorter recovery times,” said Wisniewski.

“These utilities must recognize they are being targeted and take proactive action to monitor their exposure of remote access and network devices for vulnerabilities and ensure they have 24/7 monitoring and response capabilities to minimize outages and shorten recovery times. Incident response plans should be planned in advance, the same as for fires, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes, and be rehearsed on a regular schedule.”

Freshworks today announced the appointment of Dennis Woodside as Freshworks’ Chief Executive Officer & President, effective later today. Woodside, currently Freshworks’ President, will succeed Girish Mathrubootham, the company’s Founder, as CEO.

Mathrubootham will transition to a new role of Executive Chairman. Mathrubootham will remain the chairman of the Board of Directors, and Woodside will also remain a member of the Board of Directors.

“When I first proposed this next step to the Freshworks Board, we were starting to chart the next phase of our company’s journey. We brought Dennis on board to partner with me on crafting an ambitious growth plan, and my hope was that he could eventually lead the team of talented employees around the world to execute it, which would allow me to spend more time on the long-term product vision, innovation and AI strategy,” said Mathrubootham.

“Dennis has a deep understanding of Freshworks’ business, customers and our employees, and a strong track record of building and scaling large global teams – he is the right leader to become our next CEO. I’m thrilled to announce this transition.”

Girish Mathrubootham, Founder -CEO

Woodside joined Freshworks as President in September 2022. Since then, Woodside has accelerated Freshworks’ investments in enterprise grade products, and driven increased focus on the growth of mid-market and enterprise customers.

Woodside brings great leadership experience to this new role. Previously, Woodside served as Chief Operating Officer of Dropbox, helping grow revenue from $250M to $1.3B and ultimately raising over $1B in a successful IPO in 2018. Prior to that, Woodside held various sales and strategy leadership roles at Google from 2003 to 2014, including serving as CEO of Motorola Mobility after Google acquired the company in 2012. Before his long tenure at Google, Woodside was a consultant at McKinsey & Co. Woodside currently serves on the board of the Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula in California and previously served on the board of the American Red Cross from 2016 to 2022 and on the board of ServiceNow from 2018 to 2022.

In his new role as Executive Chairman, Mathrubootham will remain highly engaged with our product vision, customers, and employees. He will work across the company to bring Freshworks’ long-term vision to life and consult with Woodside on strategic decisions. The transition frees him up to spend more time with our product teams in India, and our customers globally, and stay engaged with other external stakeholders.

“As I step into the role of CEO, I am deeply honoured to build upon Girish’s remarkable legacy,” said Woodside. “What he has created is truly special. Our mission and strategy remain the same. We stand before extraordinary opportunities and have the right foundation to make it possible – a winning combination of our strong focus on delighting customers and our product portfolio and innovation. I’m committed and excited to continue our journey of growth.”

Juniper Partner Advantage 2024 expands its partner ecosystem and AI-Native Networking offerings to maximize performance, productivity, and profitability

Juniper Networks, a leader in AI-Native Networking, today announced the next evolution of its global Juniper Partner Advantage (JPA) Program. The new elements will help partners leverage AI for IT Operations (AIOps) to offer managed networking services for increased reliability, agility and reach on the path toward unlocking new revenue opportunities and equip customers with solutions that enable a consistent experience-first approach across their networking infrastructure.  

As part of the JPA Program expansion, Juniper has introduced a new Partner Assured designation to provide partners who have rich Juniper practices with third-party validation from Information Security Systems International (ISSI) of their capabilities across the customer lifecycle. By equipping partners with market leading AIOps and verification of superior customer outcomes and lower operational costs, Juniper’s Partner Assured designation helps to accelerate partner profitability.

“By offering world-class partner programs alongside a suite of innovative and secure AI-Native Networking solutions, Juniper sets the foundation for partners to unleash their value, speed and scale,” said Gordon Mackintosh, Group Vice President, Juniper Partner Organization at Juniper Networks.

Additional Juniper Partner Advantage 2024 program highlights include:

• Managed Network Provider Designation: Juniper has transformed its managed service provider (MSP) designation, which saw a 44 percent growth in the number of partners receiving the designation last year, with new AI capabilities that can improve customer service and increase profitability for partners.
• New Advisor Designation: The new Advisor designation rewards partners for influencing customer decisions and optimizing customer success.
• Environmental Sustainability: As more customers require partners who are skilled with and committed to sustainability as a compliance imperative, Juniper amplifies partners’ driving sustainable outcomes through JPA. This encourages our partners, working with our customers, to make progress toward key climate goals, including decarbonization, addition of sustainable technology, and reducing and recycling of waste.
• Recognizing Vertical Expertise: Juniper is adding acknowledgement of partners’ vertical expertise to JPA, allowing recognition for those with rich vertical GTM motions and demonstrated proficiency that meet these unique customer demands.
• Enriched Partner GTM Engagement: This program enhances collaboration by offering account mapping, GTM concierge services, investment, and dedicated planning through the entire customer lifecycle.
• Deal Central Dashboard: This new tool consolidates Juniper partner deals, quotes and marketing leads, streamlining the deal registration process and enabling partners to respond in two hours or less for 80 percent of commercial deals and six hours or less for strategic deals of less than $250K.

Through the Juniper Partner Advantage Program and its innovative AI-Native Networking Platform, Juniper is committed to helping partners maximize performance, productivity, and profitability. Coming off the heels of 233 percent growth in participants YoY, Juniper has expanded its existing Champions Program to bring more scale and expertise to participating partners through a robust extended sales force delivering strong Juniper acumen to support our mutual customers. Additionally, as partners expand investments to gain deeper technology expertise, there has been 20 percent sales growth YoY for partners invested with three or more Juniper specializations. Together with its partners, Juniper is delivering speed, scale and value to its customers, ultimately making every connection count.

“Juniper’s innovative approach to AI-driven networking and the recent enhancements to the JPA program, helps us to differentiate our as-a-service offerings to support our customers across the entire customer lifecycle while providing us with opportunities to accelerate profitability.” Jim McKenna, Vice President, Strategic Partnerships, Black Box

“Customers turn to Presidio’s Managed Services for our team’s expertise and to strategically complement their organizations and manage their day-to-day infrastructure. Partnering with Juniper for their industry leading AIOps enables us to build out a comprehensive offering to our customers with tangible results.” Norm Egan, Vice President, Presales, Presidio

“The new Partner Assured designation provides an incredible opportunity for us to differentiate our customer offerings through third-party assurance of our capabilities to deliver exceptional outcomes across the entire customer lifecycle. This new designation, combined with our GTM approach and Juniper’s market leading AIOps, create a compelling offering for our customers.” Mohamed El Haddouchi, Managing Director, Nomios Netherlands and Group CTO