Amber Group has acquired the majority equity in cybersecurity company NightVizion, from the US-Based Vizius Group, to assist governments and corporations across the Caribbean reduce cyber attacks.

According to Amber Group’s Managing Director, Michael McNaught, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the level of hacking and ransomware threats across the world. He said the latter prompted the decision to acquire NightVizion, which will be renamed Amber Cybereye.

“In the last year, we have seen the largest technology companies in the world, subjected to these attacks. While we can do everything in our power, cyberthreat remains a moving target,” McNaught said.

“To this end at Amber, we have always been conscious of the critical importance of cybersecurity and while we have focussed on our servers and applications, we did not offer third party services to our clients to protect their systems,” he added. “As such, Amber has significantly invested in acquiring majority equity in a US-based cybersecurity firm, NightVizion, subsidiary of the Vizius Group, the team of which boasts over 18 years of expertise in the cybersecurity space, having worked for several US-based multinational enterprises.”

The announcement was made at Amber Group’s sixth-anniversary function, which was held virtually on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Amber Group’s Chief Information and Security Officer, Glenn Johnson, encouraged governments and corporations in the Caribbean to start taking cybersecurity seriously.

“The prevention of cybercrime is very possible. It’s not an absolute guarantee that we can prevent cybercrime, any more than it’s guaranteed that we can prevent physical crime, but we can do a lot of things that can reduce the risk of the corporations to a certain amount of level,” Johnson said.

He said cybercrime is a US$6 trillion threat to corporations across the world each year and has also affected the Caribbean, although the impact is not known.

He stated that there is a lack of data in the region on cybercrime tactics, tools, techniques and targets.

“Amber is creating a solution to this problem. We are implementing a cyber threat intelligence network, by the end of the year, that will have a basis in Jamaica and we will have a cyber operation centre with staff 24/7 that we will deploy with the help of many corporations and governments,” Johnson shared.

“We are going to deploy a network of sensors that will help answer this question, that will monitor internet traffic for attacks, inbound and outbound and present this data back to law enforcement to help them fight cybercrime.”