Cyber Threat Prevention

Authored By: Zakir Hussain - Director, BD soft, Country Partner of Bitdefender

Cyber threat and virus-attacks have dominated the tech news today. No matter how expeditiously technology has been upgrading its arms, cyber-threats have always been a deal-breaker. As a matter of fact, what makes businesses to take too long to recognise and react to a data breach, is the operations over out-dated technology which is just partially effective and protects a peanut-sized data. A major number of organizations across the world have already an active breach of some sort; and what’s worse, those organizations may be entirely clueless about it. Hence, it’s time CIOs must focus on defense, an emerging area called ‘Breach detection’.

Back in days, ‘easy targets’ were what hackers always looked for. These online criminals mainly used a broad ‘Spray and pray’ ideology to hit the bull's eye. But fast forwarding to today, hackers evolved, attacks evolved and organizations have bolstered them more sophisticated.

While a number of effective security companies have been introduced to the market in recent years, hackers are consistent with finding creative ways around these tools. Intrusion is one of the basic and most-happened breach scenarios. But the real damage occurs when the hackers reach out from the first line of defense.

Identifying the threats and risks, is daunting for a number of companies. But it is important to assess them with proper mapping exercise that should include the assurance of operating the latest technology and systems. Prevention, detection and response are all equally essential while developing a cyber-security strategy that blends the value and sensitivity of your data.

To detect the breaches earlier, the solutions revolve around updating and upgrading the systems with the modern day technology and skills of the cyber-threats to analyse the evolution. By leveraging the intelligence generated by other organizations around the world, will be a huge advantage to rapidly detect a breach.

To efficiently locate the breaches and investigate the security threats, analysts deploy the Modern technology and simulate the mock breaches to comprehend the capabilities. Most of the time, human insight is what makes the difference in rapidly breaching detection. And hence, there is a requirement of the vigilant training program such as Vulnerability assessment and penetration testing.

A cyber threat incident will always need an effective response which all starts with identifying, later investigating and the taking an action to address the incident and any data or systems affected must be recovered. In this case, Employee awareness is of the cyber-security is foremost. Employees must create a secure back-up of their systems as amidst this process, it may cause the systems to shutdown entirely.

The organizations realise the breaches, later as they are accompanied by trails that makes it difficult to determine the “who, what, where and when” of a data breach. Enterprises use several breach detection systems to protect against the variety of advanced threats such as unidentified malware. Basically, these systems focus on malicious activity within the network it protects. By determining factors such as possible breaches, heuristics, traffic analysis, and risk assessment, BDS locate the breaches.

BDS works with blocking the initial wave of the intrusion. Therefore, the cyber-threat or the malware does not find a breach in the first place. BDS rely on the experience-integrated system that analyses the relevant data with a happened breach to bring an outcome. It does not rely on pre-defined rules or the signatures, limited perimeter and volume to detect but the behaviour of the malware.

Likewise the several other aspects of IT, breach detection are a part art and part science. What creates a difference from a good analyst from a great analyst is the not just the technology used but also ‘how they think’. Avoiding misconceptions enable security teams to accost the breaches and detect them strategically.