Sergey Tairyan: Empowering the Society with Innovative Cybersecurity Strategies

Digitain is known as an award-winning and leading sports betting software provider servicing in the global online betting and gaming industry. It offers a customer-first approach with a wide range of supporting services such as guidance on licensing, customer care, and so on. The platform offers products like the iGaming platform, sportsbook software, casino games aggregator, DGbuilder, table football, virtual sports, live casinos, and many more.

Innovating Solutions for Talent Pools

Digitain is one of the largest IT companies in Armenia that offers turnkey and white-label innovative solutions at a global scale. With its international partners from across all continents and offices in the UK, Malta, and Cyprus. Digitain has more than 1700 talented experts. Its award-winning omnichannel platform and sportsbook with integrated payment gateway, bonus engine, and CRM system are comprised of 100 sports in 7500 leagues on 70.000 live events per month.

Digitain has projected its more than two decades of experience into building DigiTown tech hub to support innovation and boost the talent pool. DigiTown aims to set a new benchmark with Armenian IT startups and scale the Armenian ecosystem.

An Empowering Leader with an Expertise in Cybersecurity

Sergey Tairyan holds a Ph.D. in Technical Sciences, who is also an author of more than ten international publications and tutorials on information security. He is an Information Security Lecturer in Armenian-Russian University for more than a decade now.

During his professional activity, Sergey has conducted Information Security and Social Engineering training for RA Ministry of Finance, employees and members of the National Assembly, different direction public, private sector as well as the NGO. He was the Information Security Consultant in the RA State Revenue Committee for more than seven years till now consulting Yerevan Municipality on Information Security and Blockchain.

Sergey Tairyan is the CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) of Digitain with main responsibilities such as the description of the structure and behavior for the company's security processes, information security systems, personnel, and organizational sub-units, showing the alignment with Digitain's mission and strategic plans; and threat hunting— proactive security search through networks, endpoints, and datasets to hunt malicious, suspicious, or risky activities that have evaded detection by existing tools.

A Certified Professional with Superior Knowledge

Sergey has received deep theoretical and mathematical knowledge at the Armenian-Russian University and at home. He has participated in multiple pieces of training such as IT audit in Slovenia, Russia; ethical hacking and penetration testing in Russia; SOC analyst in the Netherlands. Sergey is also known as the certified BS ISO/IEC 27001/2013 ISMS lead auditor as well as the certified blockchain expert (by the Blockchain Council).

Confronting Challenges with a Deep Understanding

Sergey has started his career as a Systems Administrator in an insurance company, and this helped him to dive deeper into technical and practical issues of information security. Much has changed over the years, but the main thing remains— the deep understanding of information security risks for the head owner of the company (Julius Caesar is a great example of a leader who was "pretty well" in information security).  Especially in SMEs and startups, security risks are often underestimated. This almost always leads to irreversible consequences for the information system.

Insights from a Successful Tech Leader

A lot of people buying "well-known" brand's devices and services, usually think that "big brand" made the device "secure and private by design". But actually, in the era of business, tech companies creating something new, are in a hurry to enter the market with brand new devices or services. In practice, these companies spend a lot of time on developing a new product but spend much fewer resources on its security. This is confirmed by the daily hacking news. Therefore, everyone needs to take care of their own cybersecurity and privacy. He mentions two vital attributes that comprise a technology leader i.e., tech security expertise and psychology skills.

Identifying Secure Environments in the Pandemic

Last year, when the pandemic began, almost all companies switched to remote work. As ordinary users are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain, a wave of phishing attacks with references to the pandemic broke out. Many have started using their own devices for work and new information security risks have emerged. Digitain has developed an innovative strategy to ensure the cyber security of its employees, not only while working on a corporate device, but also to ensure their personal cyber security. Everyone in Digitain can install a corporate antivirus on personal devices and can ask for help at any time with their own device problems.

Disruptive Technologies for Better Outcomes

In the case of AI, people who use machine learning and developing artificial intelligence should always keep in mind if the machine does the right thing when it learns. How many errors are acceptable? To verify the validity of the actions of artificial intelligence, AI auditors will be needed who will supervise and re-teach AI.

In the case of blockchain, it is currently at that stage of evolution just like the Internet in the early 2000s. Sergey thinks that in a few years the use of blockchain technology will be more widespread in industries such as iGaming, healthcare, supply chain, land ownership, digital marketing, finance, and cybersecurity.

Last but not least, in the case of quantum computing and steganography, the problem of the stability of cryptosystems arose with the advent of quantum computers. Over time, cryptosystems will give way to stegosystems based on post-quantum algorithms with stegochannels for data transmission.

Predicting a Protected Journey to Success

From an iGaming industry perspective, it seems clear that the ever-present, and growing, cyber security threats will lead to ongoing greater investments in enhanced security systems. Mobile platform security could be an area of particular focus, given the importance of this channel to the iGaming industry, with up to 70% of bets now taken via this method.

At Digitain, the team continues to invest in the security and stability of the platform, developing both security systems and security teams, in order to ensure the company continues to out-innovate any potential cyber threats. The team will also continue to enhance AI-driven, self-healing security solutions, which will become even more important moving forward, to deal quickly and efficiently with increased volumes of cyberattacks. As a company, trust is part of the DNA and the team will continue to work tirelessly and effectively to protect partner networks and their data from cybersecurity threats.

Essential Approach for Budding CISOs

Julius Caesar is a great example of a leader who was "pretty well" in information security. "Caesar Cipher," is one of the earliest known ciphers, being developed around 100 BC, it was used by Julius Caesar to send (and receive) secret messages. Caesar shifted each letter of his message three letters to the right to produce what could be called the ciphertext.

The main thing is to approach the solution of the problem as Caesar advised— Veni, Vidi, Vici.