What is CyberSecurity? Why is it important?
Updated: Nov 30, 2021
Cybersecurity is the practice of defending computers, servers, mobile devices, electronic systems, networks, and data from malicious attacks. It's also known as information technology security or electronic information security or it can be network security.
What is Cyber Attack ?
A cyber attack is a set of actions performed by hackers, who try to gain unauthorized access, steal data or cause damage to computers, computer networks, or other computing systems. A cyber attack can be launched from any location around the world. Cybercriminals can use a variety of methods to launch a cyberattack including malware, phishing, ransomware, and Man-In-The-Middle Attacks. Organizations are exposed to cyberattacks through inherent risks and residual risks.
Who are Cyber Criminals ?
Cyber criminals, also known as hackers, often use computer systems to gain access to business trade secrets and personal information for malicious and exploitive purposes. Hackers are extremely difficult to identify on both an individual and group level due to their various security measures, such as proxies and anonymity networks, which distort and protect their identity. Cyber criminals are using more ruthless methods to achieve their objectives and the proficiency of attacks is expected to advance as they continue to develop new methods for cyber attacks.
Cyber Crime Techniques
There are a number of techniques that cyber criminals leverage to access personal and private networks. Some of the most common include:
Botnet – a strategically developed network of bots which crawl the backend of the web to spread malware with very little detection.
Malware - “Malware” refers to various forms of harmful software, such as viruses and ransomware. Once malware is in your computer, it can wreak all sorts of havoc, from taking control of your machine, to monitoring your actions and keystrokes, to silently sending all sorts of confidential data from your computer or network to the attacker's home base.
Zombie Computer – A computer which is deliberately hacked by cyber criminals in order to gain access to and/or attack a private network.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) – with a DDoS attack, cyber criminals are not necessarily seeking to access data, but rather are hoping to shut down a network via an overload of junk data. An example of a DDoS attack occurred on Friday, October 21, 2016, when cyber criminals shut down a number of highly utilized websites, including Twitter, Spotify, and Amazon.
Phishing - In a phishing attack, an attacker may send you an email that appears to be from someone you trust, like your boss or a company you do business with. The email will seem legitimate, and it will have some urgency to it (e.g. fraudulent activity has been detected on your account). In the email, there will be an attachment to open or a link to click. Upon opening the malicious attachment, you’ll thereby install malware in your computer. If you click the link, it may send you to a legitimate-looking website that asks for you to log in to access an important file, except the website is actually a trap used to capture your credentials when you try to log in.
Countermeasures Against Cyber Attacks
To help protect their organization from cyber attacks, there are number of countermeasures that cybersecurity professionals can implement:
Network Encryption – a security protocol implemented at the network level which encrypts data so network access is limited to authorized computers.
Proxies – a security strategy which connects users to a remote location so that their data and information is encrypted. Proxies can allow users the ability to manipulate their shared information so a potential hacker would acquire wrong or misleading data.
Firewalls – a network wall which helps users prevent access from dangerous parties.
Ensure endpoint protection - Endpoint protection protects networks that are remotely bridged to devices. Mobile devices, tablets and laptops that are connected to corporate networks give access paths to security threats. These paths need protected with specific endpoint protection software.
Backup your data - In the event of a disaster (often a cyber attack) you must have your data backed up to avoid serious downtime, loss of data and serious financial loss.
Why cyber security is important?
In today's world everything is connected to internet and our all data is on internet. To protect our sensitive data, our system our reputation learning cyber security is very important.