Why Is Cybersecurity Important? Defining Risks and Solutions

#Article
#Software Development
#FinTech
July 29, 2020 8 min read

Cybersecurity problems firmly take place in each company’s daily life and become a buzzword for executives and risk managers. The reason is the high price of data breaches that continue to grow year after year. In 2019, American healthcare agency underwent the biggest cyberattack of the year, exposing 11.9 million records of personal information.

Canadian financial corporation Desjardins said their cost of a data breach was US$108 million last year. Also, in 2019, British Airways was fined US$236 million due to the GDPR violation, namely for exposing details of about half a million customers.

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The most vulnerable sectors for cyber attackers remain to be business, healthcare, education, fintech organizations, and the military sector. That’s why organizations worldwide are now struggling to anticipate the risks early by detecting vulnerable spots and avert crimes followed by massive expenses.

From data breaches and IT security skills gap to detection tools and multicloud strategies – let’s take a look at cybersecurity risks, trends, and solutions that are likely to reshape the industry in 2020.

Why Is Cybersecurity Important?

Analyzing the actual number of cybercrimes across the globe, one can undoubtedly answer the question ”why is cybersecurity important?”. The multiple breaches have already created havoc among thousands of organizations. Recent research unveils the current state of the most devastating cyber thefts of 2020, so far:

  • The number of disclosed records at the 2020 start reached 8.4B, which is trice more than the first quarter of 2019 and appeared to be the biggest breach in any Q1 for the last 15 years.
  • An incorrectly configured Elasticsearch cluster compromised 5.1B records. With this case in mind, the number of records rose by 48% compared to the first quarter of 2019.

current state of the most devastating cyber thefts

  • Nearly 70% of registered data leaks are the result of unauthorized access to internal services. Meanwhile, about 90% of the records were stolen due to sharing data through the internet.
  • Eleven breaches compromised over 100M data units each, and five data violations disclosed 10 to 99M records.

The Biggest Cybersecurity Challenges

Listed below are the key challenges impacting the development of cybersecurity solutions and hindering their effectiveness.

1. Data leaks are a major cyber threat.

As we mentioned, many organizations consider cybersecurity as their number one priority as they experience extreme losses due to data breaches. The latest statistics reveal that the average cost is almost US$4 million. The tendency will exist as long as personal information remains a valuable product of the shadow economy.

global_averages cybersecurity

2. The lack of cybersecurity expertise leads to more attacks.

The need for cybersecurity experts is exceeding the actual number of industry professionals, notwithstanding the security specialists face more violations than ever. A shortage of cybersecurity specialists is almost 3 million across the globe.

This number is having a dramatic impact on businesses and the individuals accountable for security. According to the survey, 63% of organizations have a lack of cybersecurity personnel. Approximately 60% of the surveyed companies report being at middle to high risk of cyber attacks due to this deficit.

cybersecurity gap_by_region

To fill this gap, companies need to dedicate almost 10% more budget than they currently do. The development of cybersecurity will enhance the resiliency across the company-wide operations and help avert devastating consequences. Finding a reputable IT partner is vital in building a reliable cybersecurity platform. Innovecs can guarantee the quality and timeliness of the delivered products.

3. Compromised cloud security needs a complex approach.

Along with cloud migration, businesses have to rethink their approaches to keep sensitive data secure. Threats amid cloud environments continue to grow forcing organizations to learn quickly respond to attacks and adopt real-time threat detection.

The most common cloud security threats are data breach(s), data loss, denial of service (DoS) attack (causes downtime of application), crypto-jacking (illegal processing of cryptocurrency transactions), and hijacking (gaining access to personal credentials).

cybersecurity cloud_grow

Among the best practices to improve cloud security are conducting risk assessments, creating a contingency plan, security monitoring systems based on AI. According to a recent study, AI-driven cybersecurity tools help organizations save nearly US$2.5 million.

4. Mobile becomes the most vulnerable platform for cyber attacks.

The use of mobile phones among company workers keeps growing, so does the volume of the company’s data processed on these devices. This may cause an increase of data misuse and, as a result, lead to critical data loss and costly recovery process. Thus, security teams need to check, verify and protect every mobile device accessing corporate systems to minimize associated risks.

5. Need for better security of the connected devices.

A rapidly developing IoT sector has always had many vulnerable spots for hackers. The potential targets may include smart connectivity of cities and houses, virtual assistants, connected vehicles, and more.

Attacked IoT devices like routers or network-attached storage can expose access to data, become pathways for future crimes, or serve as a hacking drone. Home intelligent services and wearables can also be used to steal personal information and other valuable data.

connected

6. Artificial intelligence capabilities misused by hackers.

Cybersecurity management leverages deep learning methods for face recognition, natural language processing (NLP) for smart assistants or in-depth data analytics, and AI-enabled threat prevention methods.

However, AI is also being exploited by cybercriminals to create complex fraud techniques. For example, hackers use automated phishing attacks which are more likely to succeed thanks to more convincing communications with customers. Other adversarial AI tools include chatbots, text messengers, AI-based malware. Sophisticated hacking techniques allow creating malware that imitates regularly used system components, providing access to highly critical information.

Here is the moment when we can ask ourselves: why is cybersecurity important? Because to combat such super-intelligent fraud, a company needs to have an equally powerful internal system that would predict threats and detect fraudulent activities. Innovecs team can help design a robust security system powered by AI and other smart tools to recognize threats early and eliminate them immediately.

Cybersecurity Solutions: Trending Technologies to Overcome Challenges

We suggest some revolutionary technologies that will inevitably impact everything we do every day, from the way we work to the way we communicate, travel, and have fun. The cybersecurity specialists have to be ready to meet these brand-new opportunities and leverage them to provide the utmost protection.

Cybersecurity And 5G

5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology, offering a super-fast download experience, online watching, and brand-new opportunities such as smart cities, connected vehicles, and immersive education. 5G is projected to generate a trice more traffic monthly by the end of 2024. But the more data is created, and the more devices are attached to the internet, the more cyber threats emerge.

To combat these risks, organizations embracing 5G must make the most out of it. According to the report by AT&T, 72.5% of the respondents say they are highly or medium-highly concerned about the potential effect of 5G on security.

cybersecurity effect_5G

Cyber professionals, however, suggest adopting virtualization as the key technology to transform the enterprise security approach.

Since virtualized security can be quickly deployed to arbitrary locations, it can instantly react to the potential threat and turn on a security option such as a firewall. The benefit is that these defensive actions can be automated, which is more reliable and faster than manual procedures.

Multicloud Environments

The migration to multicloud hosting has been significantly important, to say the least. According to the IBM survey, almost 98% of business leaders strive to adopt several hybrid clouds at a time by 2021. Moreover, the current multicloud adopters are 85% of companies.

Since nearly all modern companies tend to reckon on multicloud hosting, their cybersecurity solutions will switch to centralized visibility and automation throughout their diverse clouds.

Centralized visibility and automation offers:

  • High transparency of access rights and better threat management across the clouds.
  • More stringent authentication requirements and cloud resources protection initiatives.
  • Easier cloud compliance, which is achieved thanks to centralized control.
  • Persistent audit and analytics, which will protect sensitive data and prevent breaches.

Moreover, transparency allows us to overcome a serious security issue – misconfiguration. The latter is often a reason of application downtime or a security breach.

Rise of Detection Tools

Novel cyber threats provoke the development of detection technologies. For example, file-less malware works within memory, leaving sings of presence. This malware can remain inactive and evade detection by only operating in the device’s random-access memory.

AI-powered malware is tricky to recognize as it emerges and this leads to difficulties with threat data management. Luckily, new detection tools are here to identify and fight off these incidents.

According to recent G2 Crowd research, the detection-oriented cybersecurity solutions underpinned by auto-remediation will outrank old on-premise systems.

Types of detection technologies include:

  • SOAR tools (security orchestration, automation, and response) are technologies aimed to collect security information and timely conduct incident management based on analytics of the gathered data.
  • Zero trust security software and UEBA tools (user and entity behavior analytics) are specialized in real-time monitoring of threats that might compromise security. These tools track and analyze user’s behavior, identify abnormal activities, and alarm the system.
  • EDR tools (endpoint threat detection and response) continually monitor endpoints (hardware devices) and analytics to rapidly assess risks and respond to cyberthreats.

These fraud and threat detection solutions will have a significant effect on enterprise security management and drive industry growth in the nearest future.

Conclusion: Shaping Cybersecurity Solutions with Innovecs

In this article, we tried to find out why is cybersecurity important? What should we do to improve it? Cybersecurity today meets plenty of challenges while expanding the arsenal of its capabilities at the same time. Here are tips to mitigate risks associated with cybercrimes.

  • Keep data secure as the cost of breaches may be devastating.
  • Invest more in cybersecurity expertise and technologies to minimize attacks.
  • Conduct risk assessments and integrate AI-driven tools to enhance cloud security.
  • Check, verify, and protect every mobile device accessing corporate systems.
  • Ensure the end-to-end safety of connected devices. Use AI capabilities to combat smart hackers’ initiatives.

With the rise of emerging technologies, such as 5G and AI, the brand-new threats appear. So the businesses must take measures to be able to respond to attacks timely. To make your business resilient and secure from edge to edge, consider the following technologies for implementation:

  • Embracing 5G to transform traditional security systems into a virtualized one. This allows you to react faster to cyber-attacks and remove them automatically.
  • Moving to multicloud environments, which enables unified visibility and centralized control of enterprise-wide processes.
  • Appealing to detection-tools to recognize intelligently trained malware and other advanced cyber threats.

Finding a partner, like Innovecs, in global software development is key to the successful modernization of the business. Innovecs has broad-spectrum expertise, from machine learning and data science to virtual and augmented reality. This allows our teams to deliver cutting edge technology-driven services and products.

 

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