Fabio is a technology and security executive with over 25 years of international experience working for private companies and large multinationals in a variety of leadership, technical, and advisory roles. Currently, Fabio is the Field Chief Technology Officer— International at CrowdStrike, leading a team of Technology Strategists across the APJ, Europe, and META markets.

Organizations face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats across endpoints, identities, and cloud environments. CrowdStrike's 2024 Global Threat Report reveals a breakout time of just 62 minutes for attackers. To combat these evolving challenges, businesses are shifting from fragmented security approaches to unified security platforms that provide comprehensive visibility and rapid response capabilities across their entire digital ecosystem. To know more about this trend, CIO Insider interviews Fabio Fratucello, International CTO, CrowdStrike.

How are cyber attackers evolving their methods to bypass traditional defenses?
Cyber adversaries continue to increase their sophistication, becoming more agile and precise in their attacks by exploiting gaps across endpoints, identities, and multi-cloud environments. Traditional, siloed security solutions struggle to keep up because they lack a unified perspective and the holistic visibility needed to detect and respond to attacks. This fragmented approach creates blind spots that attackers can exploit.

Organizations are discovering that layering more tools only compounds complexity, leading to operational inefficiencies. By contrast, modern unified security platforms streamline visibility across the entire attack surface, enabling faster detection and more precise responses. This approach not only outpaces adversaries but also reduces operational overheads.

What are the key challenges organizations face in identifying and responding to sophisticated cyber threats?
With the average breakout time now just 62 minutes, as reported in CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report, compromised credentials and malware-free techniques are becoming attackers’ go-to strategies, making them harder to detect and stop. Cross-domain attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities across endpoints, identities, and cloud environments, present one of the most pressing challenges organizations face today.

Adversaries thrive on fragmented security postures, where point solutions, disconnected workflows, and data silos create visibility gaps and blind spots in their organization’s detection and response capabilities. These blind spots are then taken

advantage of adversaries, who often mimic legitimate operations to avoid detection. To address this, organizations need comprehensive solutions that integrate endpoint, identity, and cloud security. Unified platforms close these gaps, enabling seamless detection and rapid responses that thwart even the most sophisticated threats.

What steps can businesses take to safeguard their networks from external cyber threats and ensure data security in the cloud?
As businesses increasingly adopt cloud and multi-cloud strategies, they expand their attack surfaces. Alarmingly, CrowdStrike’s 2024 Global Threat Report highlights a 75 percent surge in cloud intrusions over the past two years.

It’s critical for businesses to understand the shared responsibility model. While cloud providers secure their infrastructure, customers must secure their own applications and data. Many businesses, unsure of their responsibilities, have deployed multiple-point solutions, creating security gaps that adversaries exploit.

To safeguard their data, applications and environments in the cloud, businesses need to prioritize cloud security within the broader security strategy. This includes the technology, policies, services and security controls that are deployed across the cloud environments.

Identity security capabilities are also critical because compromised credentials allow adversaries to gain access to systems and environments quickly, without needing to exploit vulnerability or a misconfiguration. As a result, businesses need to adopt identity security solutions that help them to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber threats across both cloud and on-premises environments.