With so much at stake and online security breaches on the rise, it’s easy to see why. Take the example of the recent hacking at Uber and the previous attacks on Yahoo servers.
You need to know what cyber threats your company faces and the most effective cyber security strategy you can use to stop them.
Want to find out what these strategies are? Keep reading!
Cyber Security Defined
The practice of cyber security involves ensuring the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of information. It includes the ability to defend against cyber attacks and recover from accidents like power outages and hard drive failures.
These cyber attacks include everything from hackers to criminal groups who are capable of executing advanced persistent threats to any enterprise.
Thus, disaster recovery and business continuity planning are just as critical to cyber security as network and application security.
Categories of Cyber Threats
According to a 2016 cyber crime report, it is expected that cyber crimes are going to cost businesses $6 trillion by 2021. With such a huge impact, it’s easy to understand why you need to understand what cyber threats exist in the world.
Common cyber threats generally fall under three different categories:
1. Attacks on Confidentiality
This category involves taking a target’s personal information. This could include things like identity theft, credit card fraud, or stealing Bitcoin wallets. On a larger scale, this could be done against a government to take political or military information.
2. Attacks on Integrity
Also known as sabotage, this category involves damaging, corrupting or destroying systems or information. These are often quite subtle but they can also become large acts of sabotage against a target.
This type of attack doesn’t involve any sort of damaging or corrupting of computer systems, but many attacks don’t follow this trend nowadays. In fact, according to cyber security strategy statistics, 77% of attacks that compromised organisation in 2017 utilised fileless techniques.
3. Attacks on Availability
These attacks involve preventing a target from accessing their data, like a form of ransomware or a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Ransomware encrypts the target’s data before demanding a ransom to decrypt it. A denial of service attack involves flooding a network resource with requests and thereby making it unavailable.
Specific Types of Cyber Attacks
1. Social Engineering
Often used to deliver ransomware, socially engineered malware is the number one method of attack when it comes to cyber threats. The end-user is tricked into running a Trojan horse program from a website they usually trust.
The only way to countermeasure this attack is through ongoing user education.
2. Unpatched Software
If an attacker deploys a zero-day exploit against you, it is hard to blame your enterprise. However, if you fail to patch your software, it will reflect on you.
Without proper patching, you will open yourself to accusations of negligence, especially if years have passed after disclosure of the vulnerability.
3. Social Media Threats
Catfishing doesn’t just occur on dating sites. Sock puppet accounts can make their way into your LinkedIn and other people’s networks too. After all, if someone who knows hundreds of your contacts strikes up a conversation with you, are you going to doubt if they’re legitimate?
This kind of social media espionage is more common than other forms around the world. Therefore, you need to be careful on which accounts in social media you engage with.
4. Phishing Attacks
This involves stealing someone’s password by tricking them into revealing it. Even smart users who are well-trained in any cyber security strategy can still fall for a phishing attack.
The best defense, in this case, is a two-factor authentication. A stolen password is completely worthless without a second factor. This could be a soft token app or a hardware security token.
Security Training
When it comes to any cyber security strategy, human factor is the most vulnerable element. You need to train your operations staff to prioritise security and your developers to code securely. More so, end-users need to know how to spot social engineering attacks and spot phishing.
Therefore, all cyber security begins with raising awareness of the matter.
At one point in time, a company will experience a cyber attack. Attackers always exploit the weakest link in a company. This is why it’s important to always perform basic security attacks, which are also known as cyber hygiene.
This helps the company identify its weak links before the attackers do.
Additionally, it is the duty of an enterprise to perform the basic elements of cyber security care. This includes storing sensitive data in safe compartments and also maintaining strong authentication practices.
A quality cyber security strategy has to go beyond the basics.
More sophisticated hackers can go around these defenses. Thus, you need to ensure you can defend every aspect of your system.
Major Areas of Cyber Security
Cyber security has a very broad scope. Any good cyber security strategy should take into account all of the core areas described below.
1. Critical Infrastructure
A critical infrastructure includes the cyber-physical system that any society relies on. This could include water purification, traffic lights, and the electricity grid.
Plugging a power plant to the internet makes it vulnerable to online attacks. The solution to this is for the organisation to perform due diligence to understand their vulnerabilities and protect against them. Everyone else should also evaluate how an attack may affect the whole system, before developing a contingency plan.
2. Network Security
The role of a network security guard is to prevent unauthorised intrusion along with stopping malicious insiders. Ensuring network security usually requires some trade-offs. For example, access controls such as extra logins may be necessary but they can slow down productivity.
There are tools used to monitor network security. However, they generate a lot of data. In fact, they create so much data that valid alerts are often missed.
Security teams are increasingly using machines to flag abnormal traffic and stay alert to real-time threats in order to help better manage network security monitoring.
3. Cloud Security
Moving any enterprise to the cloud creates new security measures that must be met with an effective cyber security strategy. In 2017, almost weekly data breaches were experienced due to poorly configured cloud instances.
Thus, cloud providers are creating new security tools to help users secure their data better. The bottom line remains though, that moving to the cloud still means you need to stay on top of cyber security.
4. Application Security
Application security is often the weakest point of attack. Still, a few organisations adequately protect the security of their applications. It all begins with secure coding practices, which should also be augmented by fuzzing and penetration testing.
The rapid development and deployment of applications have seen the emergence of DevOps as a new discipline. They tend to prioritise business needs over security but this will likely change given the proliferation of threats.
5. Internet of Things Security
Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a variety of critical and non-critical cyber systems. This includes sensors, printers, and appliances. IoT devices often ship in an insecure state and offer little to no security patching at all.
This is because these devices often find themselves part of a botnet, which poses a range of security challenges for internet users.
Steps to Set Up a Quality Cyber Security
There are a number of steps you need to take in order to ensure your business has good cyber security.
First, you need to set a vision and understand how cyber security protects and provides value for your company. Then, sharpen your priorities. Your resources are finite, so focus on critical business assets.
After that, build the right team. Your security program needs to have an appropriate mix of skill sets. This includes crisis management, strategic communications, and organisational change management.
Along with this, you must enhance your controls. This will help reflect the widening scope of your cyber security strategy. You also need to monitor the threat. As cyber security involves an adaptive mindset, you always need to maintain awareness of the threat landscape.
As no one can be 100% secure, it’s important to plan for contingencies. Incident response isn’t just a technology issue. It needs to be handled at every level in every department.
As people are the core of any business, cyber security needs to be everyone’s responsibility. Make cyber security relevant to each business area of your company.
An Effective Cyber Security Strategy is the Core of Any IT Business
If you want your company to thrive, you need to ensure you’ve incorporated a quality cyber security strategy into it, and it all starts with hiring the right experts you need.
Need help? Book a consultation today to get started.
