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DBS’ Piyush Gupta explains how the bank deals with digital trust in an era of deep fakes and misinformation

In an exclusive interview with CNA’s Asia First, Mr Gupta spoke about the challenges of tackling cybersecurity and privacy, and establishing trust in the digital world.

DBS’ Piyush Gupta explains how the bank deals with digital trust in an era of deep fakes and misinformation

DBS Group CEO Piyush Gupta attending a conference session at DBS Asia Leadership Dialogue in Singapore on Aug 4, 2016. (File photo: AFP/Roslan Rahman)

SINGAPORE: As deep fakes and misinformation emerge as the biggest challenges in the digital world, there will be a need for a global infrastructure to tackle the problem, DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta said on Friday (Oct 28).

Every day, DBS identifies more than 100 phishing sites parading as the bank and while these sites can get taken down within an hour or two, more solutions are needed to tackle bigger problems, he said.

“When you think of the enormity of this problem on a global scale, if somebody is doing a deep fake, out to some other part of the world, different geography, do I have the access … to bring it down? It’s not that straightforward,” he told CNA’s Asia First in an exclusive interview.

“I think you're going to need a global infrastructure, ‘Interpol of the Internet’, if you will, to try and really think about: ‘how do you make these things happen?’”

Security is “paramount” today, said Mr Gupta on the sidelines of the world’s first global SGTech forum on digital trust being held in Singapore.

“There are not only state actors, but large criminal syndicates, who are always trying to get into … not only end user devices - what you carry in your pocket - but the intermediate devices."

DBS’ SECURITY STRATEGIES

DBS invests a lot of time and energy in its peripheral defense, using what is called an “onion layer strategy”, with seven or eight layers of security, he said.

“I go with the premise that this is not a matter of if, but when. Some time or the other, somebody can get in. So, the other thing we do around security is use a lot of techniques which assume that somebody's going to get inside,” he said.

Among these techniques are micro-segmentation, pattern recognition, analytics and the use of artificial intelligence, he said.

One of the things DBS does, is that it contracts agencies that are constantly operating on the dark web and the deep web, that scour the web to see if there is any reference to DBS or its brands, he said.

This also helps check “is Piyush Gupta’s picture floating around anywhere spouting things which I've never said”, he quipped.

However, the process is “quite cumbersome”, he said. The focus, once such cybersecurity threats are found, is to take them down as quickly as possible, he added.

Responding to a question on how DBS stays one step ahead of scammers and hackers, Mr Gupta said that it is not possible.

“The truth is, you can't get ahead of the curve. I have no idea who might do a deep fake (and) when - you only have to be responsive, reactive, and be able to do that in as close to real time as you can,” said Mr Gupta.

THE NOTION OF PRIVACY

Mr Gupta also spoke about privacy as another aspect of digital trust during the wide-ranging interview.

Privacy is harder to manage than security, given that it is “not an absolute”, Mr Gupta said.

“The notion of privacy varies considerably from cultures. How the West liberal thinks about data privacy is oftentimes very different from Asia, where the rights of public and right of society often trump the rights of the individual,” he said.

The concept also varies by age and time, making consent architecture applicable to multiple countries challenging, he said.

While privacy and security are essential ingredients for digital trust, there is more to it, he said.

“If you really want to get the same kind of trust in a digital domain that you often have in the physical world, you need to be thinking about, first of all, reliability,” he said.

“The systems have got to be available and work when you need them, and the experience has got to be easy and seamless.”

He acknowledged DBS’ disruption to digital banking services last year and highlighted a recent days-long outage of South Korean super app Kakao.

In the case of Whatsapp, which also recently experienced issues, Mr Gupta noted that people were quick to say: “Can’t trust it, we need to find an alternative.”

ESTABLISHING TRUST

Accountability is also important in establishing digital trust, he said.

“If something goes wrong, do we know who's accountable? How do you establish accountability? And then all of this needs to rest on a bedrock of rule of law … a society where some things go wrong, we have an element of recourse you can go for a legal construct,” he said.

Specifically on establishing trust when it comes to DBS’ digital assets trading platform, Mr Gupta said that one of the good things about blockchain, and distributed ledger technology in general, is that the underlying protocols are built on being able to establish authenticity and trust much better than the old paradigm.

In contrast, the traditional system relies on institutions like banks for information, he said.

“Even though we believe that that (the old paradigm) is trustworthy, it is really quite easy to change the record, to hack the system, whereas the digital ledger or blockchain technology requires a preponderance of evidence across a multiplicity of players to be able to actually change records,” he said.

He noted that blockchain and distributed ledger technologies can be better forms of authentication and authorisation than traditional measures.

The challenge is getting to a stage of exponential large scale, and whether people are willing to accept it, he said. The process will take time, he added.

However, these newer technologies are not without their faults, he said.

“Increasingly, you also need to have guardrails to make sure people are not misusing the system. Today, you can authenticate and authorise, but you can't keep out bad actors,” he said, citing money laundering as an example.

“There are agencies today who do purity checks to make sure that tokens are authentic, genuine, they're not being tainted. But again, the software infrastructure - I suppose this will also need to improve.”

Source: CNA/ja(dn)

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