The World is Doubling Down on Cybersecurity Here’s What Business Leaders Should Know

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In recent years, the cybersecurity environment has significantly transformed due to the adoption of more stringent regulations. As hackers become more sophisticated and audacious by the day, governments and regulators worldwide are catalyzing proactive measures to safeguard citizens and businesses alike.

Following the EU’s revolutionary General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation back in 2018, we witnessed the US and even NATO forging ahead in the war against cyber criminals. For CEOs, understanding and adapting to this evolving landscape is not just a matter of compliance but a strategic imperative.

Regulations have become more intricate and stringent in response to the escalating threat landscape. A prime example is last year’s SEC cybersecurity rules, which mandate public companies to divulge comprehensive information about their cybersecurity risks and the strategies to mitigate them….Continue reading….

By: Apu Pavithran

Source: The World is Doubling Down on Cybersecurity — Here’s What Business Leaders Should Know | Entrepreneur

Critics:

A vulnerability is a weakness in design, implementation, operation, or internal control. Most of the vulnerabilities that have been discovered are documented in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. An exploitable vulnerability is one for which at least one working attack or exploit exists.

Vulnerabilities can be researched, reverse-engineered, hunted, or exploited using automated tools or customized scripts. To secure a computer system, it is important to understand the attacks that can be made against it, and these threats can typically be classified into one of the following categories: A backdoor in a computer system, a cryptosystem, or an algorithm, is any secret method of bypassing normal authentication or security controls.

They may exist for many reasons, including original design or poor configuration.They may have been added by an authorized party to allow some legitimate access, or by an attacker for malicious reasons; but regardless of the motives for their existence, they create a vulnerability. Backdoors can be very hard to detect, and backdoors are usually discovered by someone who has access to the application source code or intimate knowledge of the operating system of the computer.

Denial of service attacks (DoS) are designed to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. Attackers can deny service to individual victims, such as by deliberately entering a wrong password enough consecutive times to cause the victim’s account to be locked, or they may overload the capabilities of a machine or network and block all users at once.

While a network attack from a single IP address can be blocked by adding a new firewall rule, many forms of Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are possible, where the attack comes from a large number of points – and defending is much more difficult. Such attacks can originate from the zombie computers of a botnet or from a range of other possible techniques, including distributed reflective denial of service (DRDoS), where innocent systems are fooled into sending traffic to the victim.

With such attacks, the amplification factor makes the attack easier for the attacker because they have to use little bandwidth themselves. An unauthorized user gaining physical access to a computer is most likely able to directly copy data from it.They may also compromise security by making operating system modifications, installing software worms, keyloggers, covert listening devices or using wireless microphones.

Even when the system is protected by standard security measures, these may be bypassed by booting another operating system or tool from a CD-ROM or other bootable media. Disk encryption and Trusted Platform Module are designed to prevent these attacks. Eavesdropping is the act of surreptitiously listening to a private computer conversation (communication), typically between hosts on a network.

For instance, programs such as Carnivore and NarusInSight have been used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and NSA to eavesdrop on the systems of internet service providers. Even machines that operate as a closed system (i.e., with no contact with the outside world) can be eavesdropped upon by monitoring the faint electromagnetic transmissions generated by the hardware. TEMPEST is a specification by the NSA referring to these attacks.

Surfacing in 2017, a new class of multi-vector, polymorphic cyber threats combined several types of attacks and changed form to avoid cybersecurity controls as they spread. The world is becoming increasingly digitized, and with that comes the need for robust cybersecurity measures. Business leaders must be aware of the latest trends and developments in the field to ensure that their organizations are protected from cyber threats.