Top Cyber Security Challenges and Preventions

 As the world gets increasingly driven by digital technologies the threat from hackers or cyber criminals is growing unabated. The Cybercrime Magazine pointed to this phenomenon by stating the cost of cybercrime to touch $6 trillion by 2021. The pandemic seems to have given a leg up to cybercrime with more people working remotely from homes becoming easy targets. Also, with technologies such as 5G, IoT, AI & ML, and Big Data being used by organizations, the sophistication of attacks from threat actors has increased manifold. For any business cybersecurity company, this means the need to augment their knowledge base regarding the evolving threat scenarios. 

In 2020, the US Federal Trade Commission received alarming reports of around 1.4 million identity thefts, which are double than what was reported in 2019. With the increased use of OSS among individuals and organizations, hackers are having a field day. They leverage the inherent vulnerabilities within such software to cause data breaches. As cybercrime evolves and becomes more sophisticated, organizations need to stay updated to the latest threats and not become a conduit for hackers to commit their nefarious acts. 

What are the top cybersecurity challenges and their prevention? 

The top security challenges any individual, organization, or cybersecurity testing company should be aware of are mentioned below:

Threat from insiders: The IT infrastructure of your organization is used by many people such as employees or business associates. These people can be used as attack vectors by hackers to get access to sensitive information. Using social engineering, attackers can manipulate any unsuspecting insider into sharing confidential information. Besides, there may be disgruntled employees, business associates, or contractors having knowledge of the organization’s security practices, infrastructure details, and confidential data. Such people can compromise your IT infrastructure and carry out the theft of confidential information such as intellectual property. To monitor such threats from insiders, the implementation of user behavior analytics (UBA) is important to understand the risks each user in your organization can be associated with. 

Complex regulations: While cybercriminals do not need to recognize borders or jurisdictions when it comes to executing threats, organizations have to navigate a host of complex rules and regulations. These include GDPR, HIPAA, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and PCI DSS, among others. The regulations to enforce data protection and privacy are important to prevent cybercrime but they can create conflicting and fragmented priorities for organizations as well. These can lead to the weakening of cyber defences for organizations. Hence, the need to increase cooperation among policymakers to ensure the regulations do not create complexity for organizations but increase the level of protection from cybercrime. Also, organizations should mandatorily enforce certain regulations to strengthen their cyber defence mechanism. 

Lack of awareness: If insider threat is more about the wilful compromise of your organization’s IT infrastructure, there is another kind of risk that organizations can ill-afford to ignore – the human factor. It is alarming to note that there is an abysmal lack of cybersecurity awareness among a large section of employees. Such lack of awareness can be easily exploited by any malicious attacker to gain credentials of privileged accounts, computer systems, or databases. The only way to mitigate such a challenge is to make every employee or stakeholder aware of the cybersecurity threats by conducting periodic training. 

Dependence on third parties: The implementation of digital transformation by organizations entails the use of third-party software and OSS. This means many entry points for hackers to get through the value chain, which has been proved yet again by the recent incidences of attacks against SolarWinds and FireEye. Unfortunately, in an interconnected and interdependent digital ecosystem, no organization can work in a standalone mode. In fact, they need to assess the resilience of their IT systems as well as the extent of their attack surface to cyber threats. And to prevent the same they can take a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, they can set up a collaborative process across teams and business units to understand their digital assets and ensure an acceptable level of visibility into the IT assets. While on the other, they can hire the services of an experienced business cybersecurity company to identify and fix any inherent vulnerability in the system, applications, database, or network. 

USB encryption and control: Most employees working in an organization may not know about USB encryption. They may inadvertently end up sharing data in an unsecured environment by connecting a USB to the endpoint of a device. Such unencrypted USB devices can be exploited as an attack vector by cybercriminals. 

Cloud vulnerabilities: Now more companies are leveraging the easily available, flexible, and scalable cloud services. However, the misconfigured cloud is a reality that has caused many instances of data breaches. So, notwithstanding the popularity of the cloud, organizations must use a secured cloud platform with encryption technology to prevent the access of malicious actors into their virtual systems. 

Difficult to track cybercriminals: Cybercriminals using advanced digital technologies can work from anywhere in the world to mount attacks against unsuspecting persons, devices, systems, and networks. Since the exercise carries fewer risks and offers huge rewards, many people are gravitating towards it. Furthermore, technical inadequacies, easy availability of hacking tools on the darknet, and a lack of domain expertise among law enforcement agencies have made it difficult to track the activities of cybercriminals in real-time. To prevent the growing menace, policymakers and law enforcement agencies need to collaborate and establish acceptable criteria for tracking, pursuing, and apprehending cybercriminals across the world. 

Conclusion

As the world makes rapid progress into the digital age, cybercrime becomes increasingly prevalent. It is only through increasing the knowledge about threats, enforcing strict law enforcement and compliance with regulations, and strengthening the IT infrastructure that organizations can have an upper hand in preventing cybercriminals from striking. At the same time, organizations can hire the services of a cybersecurity testing company such as Offensive Shield to find out any procedural or system-based vulnerability. Apply the dictum, ‘prevention is better than cure’ for your organization.