Overlooked Cyber Security Vulnerabilities: Awareness and Strategy

Not that long ago, Internet was a completely new technology. Only a handful of businesses, tech geeks, university professors and students were accessing the world wide web. Due to the less connected over net, low usage and less popularity among public, Cyber security wasn’t a priority for companies and users.

Commonly Overlooked Cyber Security Vulnerabilities: Awareness and Strategy

The Ever-Changing Technology

The situation has changed today. Now, we live in a world of advanced technologies driven by high speed, widely connected and easily accessible internet that is used to communicate, transact and store any kind of data including sensitive and personal information. Thus, the inter-connectivity and speed are allowing us to share more information with each other over Internet. But sharing data without having a proper understanding of access privileges and security breach are making us more prone to cyber-attacks.

IT engineers and security experts over the years have always tried to develop technologies that are more secure and robust. The most prime example of this technology change is the increased use of cloud services. The cloud is a kind of platform where data are scattered and located at different location. Even though, you can consider it safe but at the same time you cannot take it for granted. Although, many cyber security companies are out there, who are adopting these new changes in technologies and are providing security solution as per the new advancements and standards, it is important for everyone to have a basic understanding of cybersecurity and its implications.

The Rise of Cyber Crime

The widespread use of technologies without knowing the vulnerabilities in them, along with the increased inter connectedness of devices is making us more prone to cyber-attacks. Most of the users are unaware of the vulnerabilities of the electronic gadgets they use. For Hackers, there is an increased possibility of attacking these human layers, who are the weakest link of cyber-security. Hackers are using phishing, ransomware, trojans and other malware to enter such systems.

Cyber-attackers are also evolving with the times of day. They are now using novel methods and mechanisms to target organizations and devices. Data theft is the fastest and most expensive rising consequence of cyber-crime. Cyber attackers not only copy or move your data but they also destroy or change it completely. This creates lot of suspicion and distrust in the workplace.

Major Cyber Crime Incidents

Over the years, there has been a lot of data infringement and hacking in the world. Many big corporations have not only lost the data and trust of their customers but also lost considerable revenue as a result of the breaches. Here, we are going to list a few of those incidents.

Primera Blue Cross: After getting access to the Primera Blue Cross’ computers on May 5th, 2014, hackers stole data of around 11 million customers. Important user data like names, email id, phone numbers, dates of birth, mailing address, Social Security numbers and bank account details etc were stolen during the breach.

Yahoo!: In January 2016, the tech giant Yahoo confirmed that usernames and passwords of 273 million users were exposed to hackers. This breach cost around $350 Million to Yahoo!. The bigger damage however was on the reputation on Yahoo.

Target: In December 2013, Target, one of the largest retailers of the United States of America announced a massive security breach in payment systems of its stores. Cyber attackers had stolen some 40 million debit and credit card numbers.

Google: Even the Search Engine giant Google was not able to protect itself from cyber-attacks. In September 2014, up to 5 million usernames and passwords of Gmail accounts were exposed to the attackers. Later on, the same data was published on a Russian forum website.

JPMorgan Chase: Russian attackers attacked American multinational finance firm JPMorgan Chase on June 2014. According to an estimate, contact information of approximately 7 million businesses and 76 million households were stolen.

Commonly Overlooked Cyber Security Vulnerabilities: Awareness and Strategies

According to a Cybercrime Magazine report [2019], it is estimated that cyber-attacks would cost around $6 trillion annually from the year 2021 onwards. Bearing this in mind and knowing the importance of cyber security, we are going to discuss some of the commonly overlooked vulnerabilities and will also suggest some strategies to maintain cyber security.

Keep yourself Informed and Be Active

It’s not realistic to think for a cyber security department of an organization to alleviate every possible cybersecurity risk. Many contemporary cyber security threats have their origin from a user error, social engineering, and mishandling of Internet browsers. A basic understanding of these breaches could protect you from a major cyber-attack.

If you are working in an organization, then it is the responsibility of the Security team to give you the basic idea of cyber-awareness. However, if you are an individual and looking to protect your devices from hackers then you will find several tutorials, articles and video blogs on these basic cybersecurity threats on the internet.

Move Beyond traditional Antivirus and Firewalls

Antivirus software and firewalls are important segments of your cybersecurity arsenal. The two most used operating systems in the world Mac and Windows have their own built-in firewalls. These firewalls have been created to build a barrier between the outside world and your data. Firewalls are designed to avert unauthorized access to your system or business networks. If you have bought a new computer then the first thing, you should do before going online is enable your firewall protection.

However, these tools alone are not enough to protect your system from modern security threats. You would need added protection tools which are a bit more expensive than your normal antivirus software. For a business organization, these tools are necessary to protect your data as the cost of mitigation of cyber-attacks could be more than the cost of these tools. However, if you are an individual looking to protect your devices, then the best bet is that you be a bit more self-aware about the mechanism of cyber-attacks.

Email and Browser Protection

As per the recent analysis, 90% of the cyber-attacks happen due to phishing emails. Attackers use email messages to scam you to fetch your personal data. Through this method, they steal your passwords, user names, account numbers, social security numbers, and other important details. Once they have this information, they could get access to your email, bank and other digital services and platforms. Hackers launch millions of phishing emails in a day. In few cases, they succeed in acquiring personal data.

Bearing this in mind, it is important to have email filtering tools. You can use these tools to filter out and block external malicious emails. It is also recommended to use a sandboxing email environment. In this environment, you can test and open files, attachments and web URLs.

The modern web browsers like Chrome, Firefox are equipped with the technologies that block access to recognizable malware sites. These browsers are capable enough to identify potentially harmful links. Once the browser identifies the link, it doesn't allow access to the website.

It is advisable to use email filtering tools and modern and updated browsers to protect yourself from cyber-attacks.

Update, Monitoring and Patching

Cyber attackers always try to find a loophole in a software environment. Using that crack, they enter into your computer system or IT infrastructure. Cybersecurity companies are also busy in finding and closing those slots. One of the most important practice is to always update your software applications. If you are not updating your software with available patches then you are openly inviting attackers to attack your system using those loopholes.

Asset Management and Identification

If you don’t have an accurate, updated and complete inventory of your IT infrastructure, then you have opened a break into your systems as you are not ware which system/ network is left unprotected. Asset management tools are the most essential components of an organization. These tools are used to track and assess your software and hardware components.

By using asset management software, you can completely protect your IT environment. It is also essential that you follow the asset reports and feed the infrastructure with the required components.

Third-Party Risk Assessment

Most of the organizations, whether they are small, medium and large in size rely on third-party vendors for their software and hardware requirements. These IT infrastructure components are seeing an increase in cybersecurity breaches. These breaches can be attributed to such third-party vendors.

Businesses should not only look after the security mechanism of their controlled IT infrastructure, software, and services, they should also consider evaluating the contract, service level agreements, procedures and security policies of third-party vendors.

Organizations should conduct an assessment of documents and other essential information of these vendors. They should also have an actual understanding of whether these third-party service providers follow the proper security machinery or not.

Privileged User Management

Cyber security maintenance requires maturity, agility and strategic awareness. Some organizations assign ‘admin’ privileges and other powerful accesses to normal users. It is essential for organizations to hand out ‘admin’ access to only manager or executive level employees.

Privilege access manager (PAM) should define roles and access to each employee. According to the roles and responsibility of each individuals, PAM should elevate permissions for accounts, users, processes, software and hardware systems across IT infrastructures. Privilege management includes many strategies and goals and by assigning appropriate level of access and least privilege. PAM could help organizations to control the flow of data. In addition, by having a complete understanding of the outflow of information, IT environment could be protected from external attacks as well as from a negligent insider.

From the perspective of cybersecurity maintenance, it is essential to examine privileged accounts on weekly or monthly basis. As a recommended guideline, PAM should assign lest privilege access more to empower your decision making.

To maintain the defence of IT infrastructure from external and internal threats; managers and supervisors should support and help cybersecurity establishment of an organizations. Managers should review and audit the movements of employee, access requests, multi-factor authentications. If managers find some suspicious activities then they should directly involve the cyber security department of the company.

From time to time, not only the managers but also the employees of the company should be informed about cybersecurity maintenance tips and tricks by cyber security department. Cybersecurity department should spread awareness among employees. Topics like danger of using personal passwords at work environment, sharing your access details with other employees, etc should be part of the awareness programs.

Role of Manager in Cyber Security

Networking and Hardware Environment

By using both vertical and horizontal integration strategies, IT department could make best use of its powerful hardware infrastructure and software to boost cybersecurity. This broad and tested methodology could provide most comprehensive, robust and agile security.

Horizontal network integration requires a compact cybersecurity application for all inter-connected devices like desktop computers, mobile devices, laptop computers, email servers and the whole inter-connected networks.

As networks become integrated with security solutions; data operations and flow become automatic, smooth and continuous. If there is a request for fast and uninterrupted processing you will have to integrate specialist hardware vertically to manage the performance and execution of the horizontal hardware. All these hardware and network integration would create a secure, fast and seamless digital environment for end user.

You cannot understate the importance of hardware for the security of workplace environment. There could be many security software and applications installed on your IT infrastructure. However, until and unless you have a robust, compact and computational hardware to back it up, none of your security solutions would work properly.

To have the best output from your software solutions provide it with most comprehensive hardware environment.

Be Attentive of Your Data Flow

Cyber security department of an organization should have complete knowledge of their network, server, hosts and gateways. They should also have complete awareness about the storage, value and flow of data in organization’s software and hardware resources.

Creating and managing the configuration, privilege and control of your complete IT infrastructure is the most essential step to maintain the flow and order of your organization’s data. While security experts could manage the hardware and software requirement manually, there are also so many tools available in the market to manage your assets in active or passive state.

Another important step is to track and identify whether the data that you care the most is encrypted or not and also where it is stored. Once you have an idea of your assets and data, you can pinpoint valid and invalid flow of data.

Think about backup and recovery

In every minute, cyber-attackers steal the data and valuable resources of an organization in the world. If the organization has pre-installed backups and data recovery tools then they don’t need to worry about their data theft. But if they don’t have any security measurements to recover their lost data then they will have to depend on hackers’ radar for ransom.

You will be surprised to know that in USA alone, nearly half of the companies ended up paying ransom to hackers. This alone is enough to prove that plenty of companies around the world don’t manage their data and business operations properly.

Data backup and recovery is not only important for the fact that you will be saved by cyber-attacks. It is also important to note that by applying data recovery process, you will be able to retrieve your data if any kind of technical cliché and corruption happens in your software and hardware environment.

The essential purpose behind backing up your data is to have a reliable resource to recover your data in case of system failure. Backup data allow you to restore your IT processing to a point in time when your IT infrastructure was working at its highest order.

Please note that while storing your backup data, you should be aware about its loss, privacy, security and corruption. You should store your backup data in a USB drive, CD/DVD disks, Hard disk of a storage, etc. You could also store your data over a cloud platform or on a remote digital storage. It is most advisable to keep your data safe over a cloud platform as cloud is relatively secure, safe and accessible from any location and at any time. For the best applicability of your backup data you should take backup copies of your data regularly.

Conclusion

We discussed in great details about the commonly overlooked vulnerabilities and areas in our IT environments leading to cyber threats. By employing some of the easy methods, tips and tricks you could easily dash out cyber security breach in your organization. If you will have a clear awareness about your organization’s assets, data flow, privileges, access and data storage then you could thwart a security breach. It is important to remain active, attentive and updated to enjoy the seamless operations of your IT infrastructure.

References:

1. https://securityfirstcorp.com/why-is-cyber-security-important/
2. https://www.thecenteratmdc.org/cyber-security-important-modern-world/
3. https://www.avatier.com/blog/the-most-overlooked-areas-in-it-security-maintenance/
4. https://www.psgi.net/10-focus-areas-for-cyber-security/
5. https://www.csiepc.com/security-risks-overlooked-vulnerabilities-best-practices/
6. https://scottishcommunications.com/aspects-of-physical-security-for-your-business/