Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Cybersecurity, M&A, and the Evolving Cyber Battlefield with Aniket Bhardwaj of Charles River Associates 4-22-25
Tue, 22 Apr 2025
In this episode, Aniket Bhardwaj, Vice President at Charles River Associates, shares insights on the growing role of cybersecurity in business and national security.
Chapter 1: Who is Aniket Bhardwaj and what is his role at Charles River Associates?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant leader. We're joined today by Aniket Barjwaj. And Aniket is Vice President and Global Incident Response and Services Leader at Charles River Associates. Charles River Associates is one of the most elite incredibly bright, gifted consulting firms out there.
We are so thrilled to have Aniket with us today. We're going to talk some today about cybersecurity in the context of M&A and a lot more. Aniket, can you take a moment and introduce yourself and tell the audience a little bit about what you do and about Charles River Associates?
Absolutely. Thank you, Scott. So at Charles Weber Associates, I lead the incident response and cybersecurity services practice, along with other vice presidents in our team. It's a critically important function where we help clients respond to and recover from some of the most high-impact cyber events, such as ransomware, data breaches, business email compromise, you name it.
We also work closely with external breach coaches, in-house counsel, boards, and cyber insurers, underwriters, claims to really help organizations navigate through chaos with clarity in the event of an incident, for instance. Most recently, we were dealing with a cyber incident involving a nation state threat actor targeting a critical infrastructure organization.
The attack wasn't just about systems being down. It was more on the lines of potential geopolitical implications, regulatory notification obligations, and really securing evidence for law enforcement in particular. So in situations like that, you're not just really solving a technical problem. You are really helping the leadership teams manage risk at the highest level under immense pressure.
On a personal note, aside from my family, which is obviously the most important part of my life, I'm someone who genuinely enjoys the intersection of problem solving and people. I really make it a point to prioritize my health and wellness because being present and ready both mentally and physically is key to showing up for clients when they need you the most.
In the end, I'm there for my clients and my loved ones when they really need it the most. So yeah, thank you.
No, and I love that. The focus particularly on physical and mental health, and you need to take care of those things if you want to take care of everything else. I couldn't agree with that more. Before we get into the heart of the discussion, Let's talk about nation state actors.
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Chapter 2: Why is cybersecurity considered the new battlefield in national security?
You know, we talk so much in World War II about the Maginot Line, about the need now to be able to build planes and ships and industrial manufacturing. And that all I think is still going to remain important. But how much is cybersecurity and cyber warfare, the future of everything, and how much both from a commercial perspective and a national perspective is
We have to be so ready to to protect ourselves and be redundant as well. What's the sense of is this the next battlefield that the cybersecurity nation state actors acting in that regard?
Sure, yeah. I mean, it is really central to the whole cyber discussion in particular. I mean, not just part of the future, but really the battleground that's increasingly defining it really from a nation state perspective. Think about it like, you know, everything we value from financial systems, healthcare infrastructure,
energy grids to intellectual property, elections, or even personal identity now lives in or depends on the digital domain. And as that dependency grows, so does the attack surface. Cybersecurity, again, is no longer just about protecting data, for instance, it's really about protecting the trust and continuity, and in many cases, national stability, for instance.
No, and the ability to take care of business, because if you're down, you can't take care of business. You can't take care of whatever your business is as well. So it's not just about protecting data. It's about just the core ability to operate, isn't it?
There you go, you know, bringing back the business in particular and ensuring that your business operations are running absolutely, you know, without being impacted, for instance. But again, at the same time, I also want to highlight like really, you know, on the global stage, we are already seeing cyber warfare reshape the overall geopolitics.
You know, we are seeing nation states using cyber operations to influence economies or disrupt critical infrastructure. We have had many cases of wall typhoon, salt typhoon, which is pretty much, you know, in the same spectrum. But again, the overall objective is to gain strategic advantage, all without crossing a physical barrier. So it's really like the low cost, high impact and often denial.
And that really makes it incredibly attractive and incredibly dangerous. So whether you are talking about the future of business or diplomacy or warfare or even social trust, cybersecurity is right at the center of it. So from my perspective, the future isn't just digital, it's really contested and those who can secure it are going to shape it.
Thank you. And you do a ton of work in sort of the mergers and acquisitions ecosystem, a lot with various private equity firms and funds. What are some of the key trends you're watching as people look at cybersecurity in the context of mergers and acquisitions? Absolutely. Great question.
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Chapter 3: How is cybersecurity influencing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) today?
That's a key element to understand. Now, the firms that get it right don't just avoid the downside. They really move faster, pay smarter, and sleep better at night.
And take a moment. You mentioned a moment ago insurance. I think there's this perspective in business that the cyber insurance, you need to have it for various different reasons. But if you actually have a real serious cyber attack, it may or may not pay. What's your sense of the cyber insurance world?
And do you help people navigate through that, companies navigate through the cyber insurance world?
So with the respect of cyber insurance, it's becoming increasingly important. We are hearing more and more organizations really ensuring that insurance needs to be in place. Now, with respect to insurance in general, it's definitely about transferring risk is what we have historically heard. But again, no matter how strong your defenses are, no organization is immune to cyber threats either.
So whether, again, it's ransomware or data theft or any regulatory fallout, I mean, insurance or cyber insurance really steps in to help organizations recover financially and operationally when those threats become the reality. How it typically works, I mean, there are various elements to keep in mind. You know, there's the coverage element.
You know, does a cyber insurance policy cover things like incident response costs, forensic investigations, you know, costs of engaging a legal counsel, again, ensuring that regulatory fines, you know, there are too many coverage elements that we need to really keep in mind, then they really help in the element of response coordination.
So most insurance policies, they really give you access to a panel of experts, for instance, like forensic firms that they have on panel, breach coaches, PR specialists. So again, you're not alone in the whole crisis situation. In fact, it's often the insurer who activates and coordinates the whole response, which is the whole duty of it. Then you also have risk incentives.
Like in my opinion, many insurers are now like tying premiums and coverage to the strength of your cyber posture. So better controls, better coverage, better hygiene, you know, obviously you'll pay more if none of that is effective. And then obviously at some point may even become uninsurable if the ultimate hygiene of your IT environment is not looking good.
Now, beyond the money aspect, what people often miss is that it's not just about the payout. It's about readiness. And from our perspective, the best carriers and brokers work with clients to run simulations or improve their IT and security controls and really reduce the risk before anything happens. So yes, from my perspective, you absolutely need it.
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Chapter 4: What is the role and current state of cyber insurance in managing risk?
So we are seeing compromise after compromise that starts with meek multi-factor authentication or sale administrative accounts or overprivileged service accounts or identities. So again, it's not flashy, but that's where the real risk lives. So we used to really think of incident response as a fire drill.
Now it's more like crisis leadership and companies that do well, they're the ones who already rehearsed the play. And maybe I'll just say this in the end, the most prepared clients are rarely the ones calling us for the first time.
I bet that's right. I mean, clients have spent a lot of time in this up front, probably also have better defenses and they know you well and they're in a better spot when something happens. Talk for a moment about this. When somebody pays for extortion or pays for ransomware, they pay these amounts to stop the extortion or live with the extortion or stop the ransomware.
How often does the same actor come back against that customer or that client or company and How do you stop when you've paid ransomware or paid extortion payment, having them not come right back at you and doing it again? What do you see there? How does that happen?
Yes, I mean, I think now you're getting in one of the most uncomfortable truths of ransomware, paying the ransom again doesn't guarantee closure. So really, I mean, I think we could spend hours and hours discussing this, but from my perspective, paying the ransom might stop the bleeding in the moment, but it doesn't mean that the tractor is gone for good.
In fact, we have seen multiple cases where the same group or ransomware affiliate returns within months, sometimes even weeks, either because the organization didn't fully close the back door or worse, because word got out that they were willing to pay. Think of it like this.
If a burglar breaks into your house and you quietly pay them to leave, but you don't change the locks, what stops them from coming back? Now, sometimes it's not even the same group. The data from the first breach might be resold on underground forums. And a second group sees you as an easy target. Now, in the event of cyber sort of like underground, for instance, a willing pair
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Chapter 5: What are the latest trends in incident response and cyberattack methods?
becomes a high value lead. So that's why a critical part of any ransomware response isn't just recovery, it's hardening, making sure you have a solid IT security hygiene, you have full understanding of your digital ecosystem, full understanding of how many assets you have in the environment. Are they patched? Are they vulnerable? Are you taking enough steps in a timely manner so that
threat actors don't end up exploiting those vulnerabilities, you know, really identify, clean up network segmentation, visibility, threat hunting to really ensure that you are ahead of the game before a threat actor successfully infiltrates your environment.
So all of that needs to happen quickly after the whole containment, because if it doesn't, you're not just closing out an incident, you're opening the door to the sequel.
Exactly, and that makes sense. So you have to – the incident response, if you are going to pay ransomware, that doesn't do you any good. It might stop the beating for the moment, but you better fix the problem or you're going to be right back at it, maybe with that same threat actor.
And I take it these extortionists, these ransomware people, it's not like the mafia where you could trust them, that you could trust their word. I take it that's the last thing you could do with criminal activity. And criminal gangs is to trust that they're not going to come at you again, because quite frankly, once you pay, they're going to do so again.
There's not a code that says, OK, you've paid us. We're not coming after you again. I take it. It doesn't. That's not the world we live in. Let me ask you another question. You know, etiquette. How do you work with clients? How does a maybe give us a couple examples of what you look so you don't have to mention specific names. But how does Charles River in your group?
Amazing, fascinating work with clients and maybe some examples.
Absolutely. So at Charles River Associates, within the incident response practice, we work with clients across the full spectrum of cyber events, from urgent breach response to proactive resilience planning. A big part of our work is helping organizations navigate the technical, the legal, and business dimensions of an incident all in real time.
So we are not just fixing systems, we are helping leaders make high-impact decisions under pressure. So let me share a few examples. In one case, a global manufacturing company was hit by ransomware that crippled their operations across three continents. Every hour offline was costing millions. Our team helped prioritize system restoration.
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