Introduction to Cyber Security Challenges
In today’s world, Cyber Security Challenges has been the national security, organizations ranging from small to large enterprises, government and private universities, hospitals, all prone to cyber-attacks from across the globe. In our quest to deal with newly emerging threats, we often face challenges that one must deal with to secure their territory.
Very recently, you might have heard that Wikipedia was taken offline (Sep 9, 2019) in regions of Middle East countries because it was attacked with a massive and broad distributed denial of service attack. So if the bad guys don’t spare a free education, what less can we expect from them?
A crisp which details out that why Cyber Security Challenges should be the top priority of top organizations in 2019 is pointed below.
Main Cyber Security Challenges
Following are some cybersecurity challenges explained in detail:
1) Advanced Persistent Threats
- The advanced persistent threats are those threats that go the stealthy way around to penetrate systems and servers and stays there for a longer time without getting noticed/detected by anybody.
- They are designed specially to mine highly sensitive information and these days many organizations fail to protect themselves from advanced persistent threat attacks.
- The APTs are not like typical malware, they are designed specially to serve a purpose, and in other words, they are being made for targeted attacks. Below is one depicted lifecycle of advanced persistent threat.
2) Evolution of Ransomware
- The last few years have seen a widespread rise in Ransomware attacks. Ransomware can also be classified as one type of APT attacks where a malware penetrates inside your system, and as the days pass, it starts to encrypt all of your files slowly.
- Finally, all the files on one’s system get locked and a ransom is being demanded usually in the form of bitcoin (Because it is hard to track it down).
- Once the payment is made, a decryption key is being provided by hackers, using which all the data can be decrypted back and the access is returned.
- There can be cases where a hacker with a very bad mindset may take all the demanded money but still don’t give the decryption key.
- Ransomware is the bane of cybersecurity, data professionals, IT, and executives. Below is an anatomy of a Ransomware attack.
Some of the examples of Ransomware are Cryptolocker, Bad Rabbit, Wanna cry, Goldeneye, Zcrypter, Jigsaw, Petya, etc.
3) IoT Threats (Attacks through compromised IOT devices)
- IoT stands for the internet of things. The IoT is a system of interrelated computing, digital, mechanical devices that can transmit data over a network without the need of any human to human and human to computer intervention.
- All of these IoT devices have a unique identifier that identifies the device through a unique code. In today’s world, every digital device that we use can be connected with a network and yes it is happening in almost all the parts of the globe.
- By doing this, we have control over the majority of appliances and devices from a single point of operation- let’s say your cell phone. In today’s world, you can use your cell phone to turn off the lights, operate Alexa, operate refrigerator and washing machines, etc. So, many consumer devices are now interconnected.
- In other words, if you access one device, you’ve accessed them all and this leads to increased risk of attacks and gaps in securities.
- There could be many reasons for these gaps such as insecure web interfaces and data transfers, lack of knowledge about security, insufficient authentication methods, insecure wifi, etc. Below is a map that shows threats related to the Internet of things.
4) Cloud Security
- There is fear is and many organizations are not willing to put their data on the cloud and they want to be reserved for a time unless it is ensured that cloud is a highly secure place and it matches with on-premise security standards.
- The main reason is, big organizations have their own Data centers and they have a full control over it, the data is located at their sites and their network(i.e. the internal network), while in case of cloud, the data no longer stands at company’s own Data centers and also the network becomes external which poses a risk.
- Few issues lead to cloud attacks, few of them are – Cloud misconfigurations, Insecure APIs, Meltdown and Specter vulnerabilities, Data loss due to natural disaster or human error.
5) Attacks on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Adopted Technologies
- It’s not so long that technologies like cryptocurrencies and blockchains have started to being implemented.
- As these technologies just have crossed their infancy level and there lies a great path for their evolution, so adopting these technologies by companies but not implementing the appropriate security controls is a big threat, in the first place, they might not be aware of the gap itself.
- So it is being advised, to understand the security controls before implementing these technologies. Some of the attacks made are Eclipse attack, Sybil attack, and DDOS attack.
6) Attacks Designed with the help AI and Machine Learning
No doubt the big data from all over the world is being fed to AI systems for various purposes, and it helps us to make our decisions. While this is a good side of it, there can be a bad side as well. Hackers can also use AI and Machine Learning to design innovative solutions for performing out more sophisticated attacks.
This was all about the challenges to cybersecurity, and we have talked about major challenges, but we might also be interested in knowing information on steps to cybersecurity, here you go:
Conclusion
In this article, we have learned about the main challenges to cybersecurity, we hope that this article will prove helpful to you to gain knowledge on challenges to cybersecurity.
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This is a guide to Challenges in Cyber Security. Here we discuss the introduction and main challenges to cybersecurity which include Advanced persistent threats, Evolution of ransomware, IoT threats, cloud security, Attacks on cryptocurrencies and Blockchain adopted technologies. You may also look at the following articles to learn more–
