“Have a Good Change Management System in Place Because There's a Lot of Risk that Comes with Distraction, and Employees Are Distracted During an M&A”

Silo Busting 46: M&A and Cybersecurity with Sam Rehman, Sobhith Grandhi, and Adam Bishop

When you think of the term “mergers” what comes next? “Acquisitions,” of course! But what follows after that? How about… “cybersecurity”? Does that concept immediately pop to mind when thinking about M&A?

According to the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of Silo Busting, it should—but perhaps this isn’t always the case. Listen as Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, interrogates Sobhith Grandhi, our Head of Technology for M&A, and Adam Bishop, our Head of Security Advisory, about cyber in the M&A era.

The conversation centers on explaining to organizations that, as Rehman says, “cyber should be a first-class citizen during your deal flow.”

Grandhi notes how much risk and uncertainty are involved in M&A situations, and how this creates opportunities for cybercriminals.

“You get an e-mail that says, ‘Hey, revised org chart, please review ASAP.’ You're gonna open that attachment,” says Bishop. This is the kind of situation that attackers “prey on and count on.” They use the uncertainty of M&A to “prey on the human as the weakest link in the chain.”

If you and your organization want an expert view on M&A risk factors, what the cybersecurity process looks like, the challenges of integration and evaluation, and more—this is an episode you’ll want to download. The risk, it turns out, is not listening.

Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon