Digitisation offers great opportunities and solutions within key sectors, such as transportation, energy, healthcare and financial sectors, which increasingly become dependent on digital technology for their core businesses. This trend will become even stronger in the future, and it is estimated that each year more and more devices are connected to the Internet and organisations continue to grow their digital presence globally.
This continued growth and dependence on digitisation also brings with it the challenges facing everyone globally as it also exposes more and more economies, businesses and society to cyber threats.
In this article, we will cover the following topics in detail:
- What are Cyber-threats
- What is Cyber Security?
- Developing a Cyber Security Strategy
What are Cyber-threats
There are numerous digital risks, also known as cyber threats. We face globally increasing daily as the methods used in these operations are constantly evolving.
They can be defined as the acts that may be conducted in the course of a cyber attack or cyber-crime to gain access to unauthorised resources, obtain or destroy sensitive and valuable data, extract money from customers or businesses, or damage a business’s ability to function.
The origins of Cyber threats can come from within an organisation by trusted users or third parties in remote locations. They can include:
- DDoS Attacks: target websites are compromised through the use of a high concentration of network requests from multiple compromised IoT devices.
- Data Breach: involves the exposure of confidential, sensitive, or protected information to an unauthorised person.
- E-identity theft: the theft or infringement of a person’s identity to commit fraud via digital technologies such as the internet.
- Malvertising: the process of embedding malicious codes into advertisement links.
- Phishing Attacks: presented with seemingly innocuous emails or websites that are infected with a malicious link
- Ransomware Attacks: a victim’s sensitive data is encrypted and only decrypted if a ransom price is paid
- Social Engineering: an effort to obtain login credentials through manipulation and trickery
- Zero-Day Exploits: security vulnerabilities that are exploited before a patch is released for them
To secure your organisation’s infrastructure, employees, users, digital tools, and services from cyber threats, you’ll need a series of actions and a clear strategy that will deliver a level of education and protection that will minimise the impact of any threat that can have on your business.
This is where Cyber Security comes into play, delivering a strategy to protect individuals and enterprises against cyber threats.
What is Cyber Security?
Cybersecurity includes the activities required to protect network and information systems, users of such systems and other persons affected by cyber threats.
(EU Cyber Security Act)
As criminals get more innovative and the opportunity to commit cybercrimes grow daily, through cyber security we become more aware of online threats, learn to detect them, and take steps to prevent them.
The field of Cyber Security involves three important factors:
People
People, specifically company employees within an organisation, are seen as the weak link in the cybersecurity chain given their access to internal resources and key data offer an often easy and valuable entry point to organisational resources.
Individuals looking to cause harm will take advantage of the failure of these individuals to adhere to basic security concepts, such as good password management, as well as being properly trained to recognise risks, such as harmful attachments or websites.
The more access an individual has within an organisation the more powerful and more prized their access becomes, and vital to remember that it only takes the access of a single user or their workstation to offer a gateway to resources and the ability to penetrate the internal network
Procedures & Processes
Businesses must have established and implemented a framework that includes user or member training, which falls under the area of Cyber Security processes and procedures, to deal with and prevent successful and unsuccessful cyber-attack activities.
These procedures must begin at the individual level, with critical processes such as secure password management, deletion of sensitive data, and steps to take to secure personal and company data, followed by education of individuals at the organisation’s highest levels on the importance of these procedures and the need to follow them.
Tools
Technology is critical in providing organisations and individuals with the tools they need to prevent and defend against cyber-attacks against major entities that need to be safeguarded such as Endpoints, Smart Devices, software, the network as a whole, and Cloud-based resources.
Cybersecurity tools can be classified into the following categories:
- Antivirus Software
- Encryption Tools
- Firewall Tools
- Managed Detection Services
- Network Defence Wireless Tools
- Network Security Monitoring tools
- PKI Services
- Packet Sniffers
- Penetration Testing
- Web Vulnerability Scanning tools
Developing a Cyber Security Strategy
The purpose of a proper Cyber Security Strategy is to ensure formulated and proactive actions in the field of cybersecurity are in place, intending to establish open and secure cyberspace that can increase employee, management and customer trust in digital tools, services and procedures.
A Cyber Security Strategy should cover and focus on the following areas of importance:
- Detection: detects any attempts to breach and impact an organisation’s digital security.
- Engagement: The actions taken upon detection of a cyber threat to minimise its impact and further strengthen the organisation’s defences, e.g. (pushing through a critical patch, increasing logging, additional monitoring and alerting.
- Improvement The process of learning from incidents and hardening defences, and making yourself and your team aware of new threats and tools.
- Prevention: Involves implementing effective cybersecurity management based on good practices and anticipated attacks. For example, access control, identity and authentication, and communication security.
- Recovery: The actions undertaken and implemented to restore business continuity in the event of a cybersecurity incident.
- Responsibility defining the scope of each individual or team, stating their duties and responsibilities, as well as who will assume what role in the process.
Once you have taken the time to include these components in your cyber security strategy, your organisation will be able to demonstrate the following once it has been put into practice.
- Confidentiality
There must be a strategy in place to ensure that confidential information is not accessible to anyone who does not have the necessary permissions.
Financial information, for example, should be properly safeguarded with sufficient permissions to prevent it from falling into the hands of a malicious third party. If there is a breach of confidentiality, unauthorised individuals may gain access to private information such as an individual’s email, bank account, or financial information. - Integrity
All digital data should remain in the same state as when we leave it, with no modifications made by a third party.
They should also not be degraded over time, such as when a hard drive dies and corrupts our files. There should also be technologies in place to regulate and maintain permissions around essential data to ensure that only the authorised people have access to and change our files. - Availability
The data and services of an organisation should be available when needed, and all authorised users should be able to access them when needed. For example, Cloud-based services, local infrastructure and secure information, to name a few, should be safeguarded against disruption, preventing critical data and resources from becoming unavailable.
Conclusion
Whether you work in the public or private sector, information security cannot be left to your Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). It must be a company-wide initiative. Given the variety of threats available, corporate leaders must make technology-related risk decisions every day, in every department.
Consider how new vulnerabilities in technology, software, and services are discovered weekly. All it takes is one weak security procedure to create a significant security risk, exposing your customers’ personally identifiable information and resulting in identity theft.
Aim to develop a strategy that is more proactive and aggressive in the field of cybersecurity, to create open and secure cyberspace that can increase organisational and customer trust in digital tools.