What is Cybersecurity?

• Cybersecurity Definition

  Cybersecurity Definition

  Cybersecurity refers to the practice of protecting networks, hardware, software, data, and confidential information from cyberthreats such as unauthorized access, theft, damage, or other malicious digital attacks by employing a comprehensive set of technologies and best practices. Cybersecurity ensures a robust security posture for safeguarding an organization’s systems, networks, software programs, and data to avoid any service disruptions or data loss.
• What are types of cybersecurity?

  What are types of cybersecurity?

  The evolving technological landscape poses multiple security challenges for businesses to survive in the digital ecosystem. Implementing intelligent strategies and security measures is inevitable to prevent rapidly increasing sophisticated cyberthreats. Enterprises must focus on multiple facets of cybersecurity to ensure complete defense against cyberattacks and data breaches.

  Below are various types of cybersecurity that businesses must consider while creating a dynamic cybersecurity strategy.

  Application Security

  Businesses need to protect their applications running across systems and functions. There must be an effective security strategy in place to implement security measures right from the application development stage. Starting from the design of secure application architecture, secure code writing, robust data input validation to threat modeling, application security encompasses implementing an array of defenses to protect against unauthorized access or application resource modification.

  Various application security measures include data encryption, firewalls, and antivirus solutions, among others, to prevent unauthorized access and modification of sensitive data sets.

  Network Security

  It is critical to safeguard an enterprise's internal network and infrastructure against unauthorized access, intrusions, or service disruptions. Businesses employ a mix of hardware and software mechanisms to ensure network security against various internal and external threats. Enterprises are increasingly leveraging machine learning to offer better network security by flagging anomalies and alerting IT security teams for any threats with real-time updates.

  Network security teams prevent unauthorized network access, network modification, and exploitation by implementing network security through a range of measures, including antispyware software, monitored internet access, firewalls, and more.

  Endpoint Security

  With workplaces going virtual, ensuring seamless remote access is critical to ensure business continuity. However, remote operations also result in cybersecurity challenges and make systems and data more vulnerable. Endpoint security offers protection while facilitating safe remote access to the organizational network.

  Data and Information Security

  Protecting sensitive data and information from cyberattacks is critical for enterprises. To enable strong data security, IT teams implement robust information storage mechanisms that safeguard company and customer information. Implementing identity management helps in authenticating and authorizing legitimate users to access information systems within an organization.

  To keep data secure against unauthorized access, intrusions, and alterations, enterprises must implement a mix of security measures at all levels. At the enterprise level, there should be an internal unit focusing on enabling data and information security with dedicated members working across functions. Next, a set of technical measures, including encryption, firewalls, and identity management, must be implemented to protect data. Finally, there must be relevant training for all the users to make them aware of the best practices to ensure the security of the data stored across systems.

  Cloud Security

  Organizations operating on the cloud require the right cloud security approach to design secure cloud architectures and applications that protect and monitor the data across cloud resources. As cloud computing continues to evolve rapidly, cloud service providers continuously create and implement new security tools to help businesses better secure their data.

  Critical Infrastructure Security

  Defending any nation’s critical infrastructure, including systems, networks, and physical assets, crucial for the continuous functioning of its economy, public machinery, and safety comes under critical infrastructure security. Some examples of critical infrastructure include the electricity grid, hospitals, traffic lights, etc. and managing these systems over the internet makes them vulnerable to cyberattacks. Organizations responsible for managing and maintaining such infrastructure should perform due diligence to understand the vulnerabilities, develop a contingency plan, and implement protection mechanisms to ensure the security and resilience of this critical infrastructure.
• What are common types of cyberattacks?

  What are common types of cyberattacks?

  As global cyberattacks continue to evolve at an increasingly rapid pace, businesses worldwide face a rising number of data breaches and are more vulnerable than ever before. A cyberattack targets any individual or business by gaining unauthorized access to their information devices, systems, infrastructures, or networks, using different methods to steal, modify, or damage data or information systems.

  Cybersecurity professionals need to protect sensitive data and business-critical systems from attackers who use various ways to infiltrate IT systems and networks. Here is the list of the most common types of cyberattacks.

  Malware

  Malicious software or malware is one of the most common types of cyberattacks that attackers use to infiltrate systems. It refers to unwanted software installed on a system without required permission and attaches itself to authentic code and starts propagating. It can hide in applications or duplicate itself via the internet to cause severe damage to individual users or businesses. Various types of malware, such as ransomware, viruses, trojans, spyware, etc., keep evolving to launch more sophisticated and harmful attacks.

  SQL Injection Attacks

  A structured query language (SQL) injection attack is a common type of cyberattack impacting database-driven applications. Attackers leverage an SQL injection attack to exploit vulnerabilities in data-driven applications via the input data. Cyberattackers insert malicious code into a database through a malicious SQL statement to get unauthorized access to the sensitive information within the database. Therefore, with successful SQL injection attacks, cyberattackers can read, alter, delete, or steal sensitive information, execute administration processes, issue commands to the operating system, and recover content from a particular file.

  Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attacks

  Hackers use distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to target a website, server, or other network resources by overwhelming them with traffic and rendering them unresponsive to service requests. In a DDoS attack, multiple systems flood the target server or network with illegitimate requests, messages, or packets, to slow down the system or take it offline, while disturbing or preventing legitimate traffic from accessing the system resources. DDoS attacks can hamper an organization’s image and reputation to deliver services and make the system vulnerable to other attacks. Some common DDoS attacks include TCP SYN flood attacks, teardrop attacks, and ping of death attacks.

  Phishing

  Phishing is another common cyberattack used by cybercriminals to send fraudulent emails which appear to be sent from a known, trusted, or reputable source. Phishing attacks are types of social engineering attacks that trick victims into giving away their sensitive information, including login credentials, credit card details, and other valuable personal information. Phishing emails either contain an attachment that downloads malware onto the device once it’s opened or ask a user to click on a fake website link and use their login credentials or personal information. Cybercriminals use various phishing techniques to dupe the target victims, and the most common types of phishing attacks include spear phishing, deceptive phishing, CEO fraud, etc.

  Botnets

  When hackers leverage a collection of internet-connected devices infected by malware to instigate malicious activities such as gaining unauthorized access, stealing victims’ credentials and other sensitive information, spreading virus and spam, or initiating denial of service attacks, it is called a botnet attack. Malware installed across the infected devices in a botnet allows attackers to control them by sending instructions using a client program. Cybercriminals then use these infected devices to gather data and information, monitor user activity, send out emails and forward information, access connected devices, or download and execute other programs. Attackers use a botnet to initiate various types of attacks, including phishing, DDoS attacks, cryptojacking, snooping, spambots, etc.

  Cross-Site Scripting Attacks

  Cross-site scripting attacks (commonly known as XSS attacks) are injection attacks that use third-party web resources to run scripts in a victim’s scriptable program or web browser. Attackers inject a payload infected with malicious JavaScript into a website’s database. When the targeted victim attempts to visit any page on the intended website, the page gets executed along with the payload as part of the HTML body which is then transmitted to the intended victim’s browser and activates the script.

  XSS attacks target vulnerabilities of web applications to deceive victims into interacting with illegitimate web pages and dupe them into clicking on malicious scripts. Once activated, the script could send a user’s cookie to the attacker’s server, which allows the attacker to extract it and leverage it for session hijacking. Hackers usually use cross-site scripting attacks to launch attacks from within JavaScript, VBScript, ActiveX, and Flash.
• Cybersecurity best practices

  Cybersecurity best practices

  Keeping with the latest security trends and threat intelligence can be challenging. However, following standard best practices may help organizations and individuals avoid cyber risks and protect data and systems from possible cyberthreats.

  Below are some of the most common cybersecurity best practices:

  • Conduct Risk Assessment: Assessing each organizational asset for the associated risks and their impact on the overall business in the event of any security compromise helps organizations prioritize and plan better while securing the infrastructure.
  • Manage Vulnerabilities and Software Patch Updates: To minimize threats against the organization’s IT systems, IT teams must have a comprehensive plan to identify, classify, and mitigate vulnerabilities across software and networks. Moreover, there should be a dynamic mechanism for updating software patches for mitigating new vulnerabilities. Organizations must keep IT systems up to date to avoid any vulnerabilities being exploited by cyber attackers.
  • Provide Regular Cybersecurity Awareness Training: Educating users on topics related to cybersecurity is as important as designing a strong cybersecurity strategy. It is critical to make employees aware of organizational policies, incident handling, and reporting process to minimize negligence and any intentional or unintentional security violation. Cybersecurity awareness training through online and offline modes helps enterprises strengthen technical defenses and avoid security breaches that can severely cost business.
  • Implement Secure Password Policies: Preventing unauthorized access is imperative to avoid any data theft, damage, or alteration, and ensuring strong passwords across the organization is a recommended security best practice. First, users must periodically change their passwords to avoid any breach due to compromised passwords. Secondly, using two-factor authentication helps to keep a check on unauthorized access attempts. Finally, password storage should follow industry best practices such as strong hashing algorithms.
  • Employ Strong Data Encryption: Enterprises must use strong encryption algorithms while storing and transmitting sensitive information. Data encryption ensures confidentiality and, therefore, must be used across web applications or software programs.
  • Design Security-focused Software and Networks: The security aspect should be considered right from the start while designing and developing applications or architecting networks. Enterprises should understand that it is costly to refactor software and incorporate security measures at a later stage, compared to building in security from the beginning. Security-focused applications reduce the cyberthreats and ensure that they fail-safe in case any software or network fails.
  • Implement Secure Coding Practices: Usually, applications are designed to accept user input, and this requirement may lead to vulnerabilities that cyber attackers can take advantage of using malicious input payloads. Therefore, strong input validation is a must to defend against different types of injection attacks by filtering out malicious input.
  • Conduct Periodic Security Reviews: Regular security reviews identify security issues early on before they convert into severe threats. For example, security reviews such as architecture design reviews, source code reviews, application penetration testing, etc., reveal security vulnerabilities that enterprises must address on priority to mitigate issues without hampering any ongoing operations.
  • Take Regular Data Backups: Taking periodic data back increases redundancy and ensures that all sensitive data is not lost or compromised if an organization faces a security breach. In addition, consistent data backups ensure resilience and provide data protection against cyberattacks that compromise the integrity and availability of data while disrupting the operations.
  • Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning: Organizations must prepare to keep business-critical systems online even during and after any security breach. It should have a contingency plan for resuming operations and systems after any cybersecurity incident that causes the loss of operations or data. Business continuity planning encompasses processes, monitoring, and real-time alerts to help organizations become resistant in the wake of any cyberattack.