Rising Tides And Higher Stakes. Cybersecurity Thought-Leader Chuck Brooks In Interview
What are the new Cybersecurity stakes – what are the vulnerabilities and risks?https://highperformancecounsel.com/new-cybersecurity-stakes-interview-cybersecurity-thought-leader-chuck-brooks/
We live in world of algorithms; x’s and o’s. Our digital world is ripe for access and compromise by those who want do harm from just a laptop and server. A myriad of recent breaches have demonstrated that as consumers we are becoming more and more dependent upon digital commerce. Our banking accounts, credit cards, and financial daily activities are interconnected. We are all increasingly vulnerable from hackers, phishers, and malware proliferating across all commercial verticals.
In the past year, the employment of ransomware has become a method of cyber-attack choice by hackers. This is because many networks (especially hospitals, utilities, universities, and small businesses) are comprised of different systems, devices and often lack required patching and updating necessary to thwart attacks. The recent Wannacry, and Petya attacks were certainly wake up calls to the disruptive implications of ransomware. We can expect to see more such attacks because of the ease of infection and because the vulnerabilities to networks still remain.
Ransomware is not a new threat, it has been around for at least 15 years, but it has become a trending one. Experts estimate that there are now 124 separate families of ransomware and hackers have become very adept at hiding malicious code. Success for hackers does not always depend on using the newest and most sophisticated malware. It is relatively easy for a hacker to do. In most cases, they rely on the most opportune target of vulnerability, especially with the ease of online attacks.
More ominous are the Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS). Tech Target provides a succinct definition of A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an attack in which multiple compromised computer systems attack a target, such as a server, website or other network resource, and cause a denial of service for users of the targeted resource. The flood of incoming messages, connection requests or malformed packets to the target system forces it to slow down or even crash and shut down, thereby denying service to legitimate users or systems. The connectivity of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its billions of connected devices is conducive for DDoS activities. In 2016 a DDoS attacks were launched against a Domain Name System (DNS) called Dyn. The attack directed a variety of IoT connected devices to overload and take out internet platforms and services.
Consider the dire and eye opening facts: Hackers attack every 39 seconds and around one billion accounts and records were compromised worldwide last year. There are estimates that global Cybercrime damage costs will reach $6 trillion annually by 2021. Cybercrime is growing exponentially and so are the risks.
What are the Cybersecurity Challenges and how do we protect ourselves?
McKinsey & Company and the World Economic Forum published a joint paper a couple of years back projecting that ineffective cybersecurity will result in a cost to the global economy of three trillion dollars by 2020. That estimate may be even greater now that IoT has expanded so rapidly along with the attack surfaces constituted by so many billions of connected devices to the internet. A Gartner report predicts more than 20 billion connected things to the internet by 2020 that can be hacked or compromised. Clearly, it is almost an insurmountable task to monitor and protect IoT. It is also very difficult challenge to keep up with the increasing sophistication of the socially engineered threats and threat actors.
A security strategy to meet these growing cyber-threat challenges needs to be both comprehensive and adaptive. It involves people, processes, and technologies. Defined by the most basic elements in informed risk management, cybersecurity is composed of:
- Layered vigilance (intelligence, surveillance);
- Readiness (operational capabilities, visual command center, interdiction technologies);
- Resilience (coordinated response, mitigation and recovery).
The specifics of a security approach may vary according to circumstances, but the mesh that connects the elements is situational awareness combined with systematic abilities for critical communications in cases of emergency. These guidelines are represented in the NIST mantra: “Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond,
Where does your cybersecurity perspectives come from?
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