Рубрика: Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity jobs are in high demand in today’s increasingly digital environment interactions

While cybersecurity is highly specialized and complex, some entry-level positions are available. All applicants must have at least three years of experience with a bachelor’s degree and one to two years of experience with a master’s degree.

1. IT Auditor: IT auditors ensure the quality of an organization’s IT systems. Setting audit objectives, acquiring data through interviewing department staff, and generating concrete strategies to enhance IT systems are some of the tasks of an IT Auditor.

2. Information security analysts: Information security analysts design and implement security solutions to safeguard a company’s computer networks and systems. They must foresee future threats in the systems and utilize their creativity to create new solutions to safeguard the company’s systems.

3. Network/IT security engineers: Network/IT security engineers work in various environments and sectors. They detect and prepare for future risks by identifying dangers and vulnerabilities in the company’s IT system and software architecture.

4. Cybersecurity manager: A cybersecurity manager is responsible for maintaining security systems, identifying system vulnerabilities, and developing methods to prevent cyber-attacks. They also supervise a team of IT specialists that detect security vulnerabilities, construct firewalls, develop proactive solutions, and provide security reports.

5. Security Testing/Penetration Tester: Penetration testers simulate cyberattacks to detect and disclose security problems in computer systems, networks, and infrastructure, including websites. A computer science, computer, or information systems degree and 2-4 years of experience in an information security capacity are necessary.

The post Top Cybersecurity Jobs Available Now in 2023 appeared first on Analytics Insight.

A population of around 8 billion is at risk today while navigating through challenges induced by COVID-19 pandemic. In order to halt the spread of the SARS-COV-2 virus, several nations have declared lockdowns in past months. This left businesses with no other options but operate at a distance while maintaining social distancing and allow their employees to work from home. Many have opted for this in contrast to their will as they can gauge the consequences of WFH like how to maintain focus, how to balance other priorities, such as childcare, and how to be productive without required tools. Besides, another major challenge that is expected to disrupt the remote working ecosystem is security.

Away from the secured environment of offices, many employees and work processes are prone to fall for cybercrime. This upheaval caused by COVID-19 has provided an opportunity for cybercriminals to come alive and attack people through coronavirus themed phishing e-mails. These emails look informative and lure people to invite malicious adventure for themselves.

The cyber defense authorities have acknowledged multiple malicious applications floating around androids disguised as COVID-19 information.

Cyber attackers are also at an advantage where individuals working from home haven’t adopted similar or better security measures on their networks as their corporate environment. Enterprises unknowingly can also give such criminals an open passage to invade their much-secured data if they do not look out for adopting the right technologies or corporate security policies to ensure cybersecurity across all corporate-owned or corporate-managed devices.

In such circumstances, leading cybersecurity software like Bitdefender can extend a helping hand to protect businesses and individuals from losing their sensitive and crucial data and resources.

Why Bitdefender?

Bitdefender is a global cybersecurity leader protecting over 500 million systems in more than 150 countries. The software delivers robust security one can rely on.

Since 2001, Bitdefender innovation has consistently delivered award-winning security products and threat intelligence for people, homes, businesses, and their devices, networks, and cloud services. Today, Bitdefender is also the provider of choice, used in over 38% of the world’s security solutions.

Recognized by industry, respected by vendors and evangelized by its customers, Bitdefender is the cybersecurity company, businesses, individuals, and communities can rely upon.

From IoT to Data Centers, from endpoints to hybrid infrastructures – Bitdefender plays a transformational role in how security is best consumed, deployed, and managed. The software delivers products and services that radically alter the customer’s experience with security, in terms of efficacy, performance, ease of use, and interoperability.

Moreover, amid these challenging times, when cybersecurity is at stake more than ever, the company has come up with its free edition for users. The free antivirus is powerful antivirus protection for Windows in a light way. It is award-winning protection against existing or new e-threats. The free edition is quick to install and light on computer resources.

What Bitdefender’s Antivirus Free Edition Has to Offer to Customers?

Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition is blazing fast, free to use, and loaded only with the bare-bones protection features that every computer needs. It installs in seconds, runs at max speed without slowing down the PC. The antivirus is quite a fit for gaming, image and video editing, and resource-intensive applications. Or in other words, Antivirus Free Edition is powerful protection packed into a light solution.

Moreover, it is available for macOS and Android users as well.

The free edition is powered by award-winning technologies including Real-time Threat Detection and Virus Scanning and Malware Removal. Where the former uses behavioral detection to closely monitor customers’ active apps, the latter’s powerful scan engines ensure detection and removal of all malware, from viruses, worms, and Trojans, to ransomware, zero-day exploits, rootkits, and spyware.

Antivirus Free Edition is a strong, silent guardian for customers’ PC as it uses a minimalistic approach to make sure of the one thing that matters: whether you’re a rookie or a techie, your PC will be defended against intruders.

Some of its significant features include:

• On-demand & on-access scanning that runs in the background
• Essential protection without the extra stuff
• No time-consuming scans, no sudden lag, no ads out of the blue

Furthermore, the Bitdefender’s Antivirus Free Edition provides free protection against Internet frauds. Its anti-phishing capabilities can sniff and block by default phishing websites that pretend to be trustworthy in order to steal customers’ data. And if the user ever lands on scam websites, the advanced filtering system detects suspicious web page behavior and prevents users’ sensitive financial data from falling into the wrong hands.

The post Adopt Better Cybersecurity Practices Against COVID-19 with Bitdefender Antivirus appeared first on Analytics Insight.

AI has been making some major strides in the computing world in recent years. But that also means they have become increasingly vulnerable to security concerns. Just by examining the power usage patterns or signatures during operations, one may able to gain access to sensitive information housed by a computer system. And in AI, machine learning algorithms are more prone to such attacks. The same algorithms are employed in smart home devices, cars to identify different forms of images and sounds that are embedded with specialized computing chips.

These chips rely on using neural networks, instead of a cloud computing server located in a data center miles away. Due to such physical proximity, the neural networks can perform computations, at a faster rate, with minimal delay. This also makes it simple for hackers to reverse-engineer the chip’s inner workings using a method known as differential power analysis (DPA). Thereby, it is a warning threat for the Internet of Things/edge devices because of their power signatures or electromagnetic radiation signage. If leaked, the neural model, including weights, biases, and hyper-parameters, can violate data privacy and intellectual property rights.

Recently a team of researchers of North Carolina State University presented a preprint paper at the 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust in San Jose, California. The paper mentions about the DPA framework to neural-network classifiers. First, it shows DPA attacks during inference to extract the secret model parameters such as weights and biases of a neural network. Second, it proposes the first countermeasures against these attacks by augmenting masking. The resulting design uses novel masked components such as masked adder trees for fully connected layers and masked Rectifier Linear Units for activation functions. The team is led by Aydin Aysu, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

While DPA attacks have been successful against targets like the cryptographic algorithms that safeguard digital information and the smart chips found in ATM cards or credit cards, the team observes neural networks as possible targets, with perhaps even more profitable payoffs for the hackers or rival competitors. They can further unleash adversarial machine learning attacks that can confuse the existing neural network

The team focused on common and simple binarized neural networks (an efficient network for IoT/edge devices with binary weights and activation values) that are adept at doing computations with less computing resources. They began by demonstrating how power consumption measurements can be exploited to reveal the secret weight and values that help determine a neural network’s computations. Using random known inputs, for multiple numbers of time, the adversary computes the corresponding power activity on an intermediate estimate of power patterns linked with the secret weight values of BNN, in a highly-parallelized hardware implementation.

Then the team designed a countermeasure to secure the neural network against such an attack via masking (an algorithm-level defense that can produce resilient designs independent of the implementation technology). This is done by splitting intermediate computations into two randomized shares that are different each time the neural network runs the same intermediate computation. This prevents an attacker from using a single intermediate computation to analyze different power consumption patterns. While the process requires tuning for protecting specific machine learning models, they can be executed on any form of computer chip that runs on a neural network, viz., Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), and Application-specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC). Under this defense technique, a binarized neural network requires the hypothetical adversary to perform 100,000 sets of power consumption measurements instead of just 200.

However, there are certain main concerns involved in the masking technique. During initial masking, the neural network’s performance dropped by 50 percent and needed nearly double the computing area on the FPGA chip. Second, the team expressed the possibility of attackers avoid the basic masking defense by analyzing multiple intermediate computations instead of a single computation, thus leading to a computational arms race where they are split into further shares. Adding more security to them can be time-consuming.

Despite this, we still need active countermeasures against DPA attacks. Machine Learning (ML) is a critical new target with several motivating scenarios to keep the internal ML model secret. While Aysu explains that research is far from done, his research is supported by both the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Semiconductor Research Corporation’s Global Research Collaboration. He anticipates receiving funding to continue this work for another five years and hopes to enlist more Ph.D. students interested in the effort.

“Interest in hardware security is increasing because, at the end of the day, the hardware is the root of trust,” Aysu says. “And if the root of trust is gone, then all the security defenses at other abstraction levels will fail.”

The post New Research Claims to Have Found a Solution to Machine Learning Attacks appeared first on Analytics Insight.

The covid-19 crisis has redefined how we work and communicate with each other. While technology has ensured business continuity, it has opened a pandora box of sorts. At one end, it has resulted in faster adoption of digital banking and other technologies, however, the at the other end, it has made us vulnerable to cyber-attacks and online fraud.

As India embraces online banking, the digital literacy of its masses has not kept pace. In a report released by Subex, a Bengaluru-based analytics firm, for April, May and June of 2019, India faced the most cyber-attacks in the world while the US was the most cyber-targeted nation in the year 2019.

India’s bank customers are particularly vulnerable to fraud. In fact, a review of the major cyber-attacks on India’s computer networks since 2010 demonstrates that the financial sector has been the most hit by unauthorised access and data breach. India ranks fourth in cyberattacks globally and in recent times this has only increased.

While RBI has made cybersecurity mandatory for banks and set up a protocol for security implementation and attack reporting as early as December 2019, the covid crisis has thrown caution to the wind.

The Ever-increasing cyber attack

State Bank of India, India’s largest nationalized bank, left one of their servers unprotected, possibly exposing the data of its 422 million customers to malicious hackers. The server, situated in Mumbai, contained bank accounts numbers, bank balances and phones of customers.

Earlier in 2016 Hitachi Payment Services were hit by a malware attack, which resulted in losses worth Rs. 1.3 crores and forced 19 Indian banks to replace more than 30 lakh debit cards. In the same year, the Union Bank of India breach allowed hackers to siphon $170 million from its foreign-exchange account. A timely intervention by the bank successfully retrieved the stolen money. However, not all are as lucky as the Union Bank of India, the money was only partially recovered in the City Union Bank breach of 2018. Around the same time, Canara bank ATM servers were targeted and around Rs. 20 lakh was wiped off from various bank accounts.

The year 2018 started with a massive data breach of personal records of 1.1 Billion Indian Aadhaar cardholders. UIDAI revealed that around 210 Indian Government websites had leaked Aadhaar details. Data leaked included Aadhaar, PAN and mobile numbers, bank account numbers, IFSC codes and mostly every personal information of all individual cardholders. If it wasn’t enough, anonymous sellers were selling Aadhaar information of any person for Rs.500 over Whatsapp. Also, one could get any person’s Aadhaar car printout by paying an extra amount of Rs.300.

In another unrelated but equally grave incident, GroupIB, a Singapore-based cybersecurity company, found out that more than 1.3 million credit and debit card details from Indian banks were held for sale on the dark web! GroupIB has refused to reveal the names of the banks but has stated that the data breach has impacted the largest of Indian banks.

Co-operative banks, the dark side of the moon

If one goes by the above reported data on state of cyber preparedness of nationalised and private banks, it is only to be fearfully imagined the extent of cybersecurity readiness of the much inferior co-operative banks.

In late 2018, Cosmos Bank, India’s second largest co-operative bank, bore the brunt of weak cybersecurity measures, when hackers siphoned off over Rs. 94 crore through a malware attack on one of its servers.

Later in May 2019, a little-known cooperative bank called Urban Cooperative got hacked and as a result lost Rs. 68 lakhs from one of its biggest accounts. In December 2019, data leak from insiders led to the loss of Rs. 29 crores from Shamrao Vitthal Co-operative Bank. If that is not all, even a bank as small and lesser known as the Chembur Nagarik Sahakari bank, which has only 10 branches and serves customers located in the Chembur suburb of Mumbai has reported hackers trying to attack its servers.

The above isn’t an exhaustive picture of cybersecurity breaches in co-operative banks; a lot of incidents go unreported either because the banks don’t realize a data breach in the first place or fear reputation loss. And this just the tip of the iceberg.

According to RBI there are 1,544 urban co-operative banks and 96,248 rural co-operative banks in India. The latter account for 64.7% of the total assets of the co-operative sector. The asset value of Urban Co-operatives banks itself exceed Rs 5632 billion.

RBI data shows that during the period 2008-17, banks in India faced 130,000 reported cases of cyber fraud involving an estimated Rs 700 crore. In comparison to the asset value held by the banks this is really small, however, a severe cyber-attack can result in bank failure even when no money is lost directly.

Moreover, the aforementioned incidents happened when there was no pandemic plaguing the world, when employees weren’t as vulnerable to attackers lurking in the shadows as they are now, when they have no other choice but to work on their personal devices over relatively unsecure home networks.

Although some of the co-operative banks may have begun complying with guidelines laid down by the Reserve Bank of India, the coronavirus outbreak has most certainly disrupted the existing cybersecurity measures ushering in a sense of urgency.

Author:

Shomiron Das Gupta, Founder and CEO, DNIF Nextgen Security Platform

With his extraordinary skill set as an intrusion analyst and immense passion for tech advancements, he has been building threat detection systems for close to two decades and has established partners in 14 countries across several industries like healthcare, insurance, transport, banking, and media.

Prior to founding and developing DNIF a product that delivers quality attack detection products and services to its customers, he worked with ICICI Infotech Ltd. as a Senior Consultant, where his core responsibility was to solve critical cybersecurity challenges faced by customers.

Shomiron, a TedX speaker, is also an eminent speaker at many industry events including DSCI (Data Security Council of India) and SACON (TheSecurity Architecture Conference).

He is an alumnus of St. Xavier’s college. Outside the tech world he is a trained mountaineer with expedition experience in the Himalayas.

The post Co-operative Banks- A Cybersecurity disaster waiting to happen appeared first on Analytics Insight.

When it comes to fraud, no industries are more prone to this than the financial sectors. While there has been the inception of many organizations with the primary goal of preventing fraud, the fact is that it’s something that cannot be contained as easily as money laundering.

Many online platforms have employed the services of institutions like TransUnion which have developed counterfeit analytics to detect and stop the act of fraud. This is done by special technology known as artificial intelligence, which is able to think for itself and monitor systems. It would use principles which have been programmed into it to make decisions and determine whether or not an act of fraud was been carried out.

Not only are these systems incredibly efficient, but they’re accurate too, and this allows an online operator to focus on the clients and enhancing their overall experience. We’ll be taking a look at the various types of fraud in online casinos and fraud analytics as a whole.

Various Types of Fraud

Criminals are creative, and to beat the system you have to think outside the box by exploiting loopholes in various rules and breaking them altogether.

Credit Card Fraud

One of the most popular types of fraud which is becoming easier to do due to information breaches of financial and credit card data being very easy to get hold of. This information is used by hackers to make purchases of luxury items and other high-value goods which will be able to be sold relatively easily once they get hold of it.

Chargeback Abuse

This is when the legitimate holder of a credit card account will contact their financial institution and report an unauthorized payment towards an online casino. This will result in the institution reversing the charges which have been made which leaves the casino responsible for the charge. This is where it becomes tricky for a fast payout online casino, as they will be able to fight the charges, but chargebacks are extremely detrimental to the relationships they have with financial institutions.

Chip Dumping

Criminals often use online casinos to launder money due to gambling winnings being deemed a legal income, they’re able to be deposited in a bank account and be claimed on tax reports. Criminals will look very suspicious if they were to walk down to the bank and deposit a few million dollars, so what they do is hire a group of people to gamble the money online and lose it all to one person. This person will then be able to deposit the money into a legit account. This is what’s known as chip dumping when a person is hired to perform an illegal practice.

Fraud Analytics

Fraud analytics is the best way to detect and stop illegal transactions from being implemented, this means that analytic technology is being used in conjunction with human interaction. This technique is based on the analysis of patterns, irregularities, and other inconsistencies. This allows an organization to easily identify a threat and put a stop to it before it becomes a significant financial problem.

This system has been used for over 20 years to combat corruption, financial abuse, and fraud, with powerful and specially designed tools being used to keep companies safe. There are plenty of benefits which come with using fraud analytics such as the identification of unknown patterns, enhancing and extending existing efforts, crossing the divide, and measuring and improving performance in the workplace.

Advanced solutions also allow organizations to treat new customers as if they’ve been long-standing clients of the company, this improves their experience by making it easier for them to access their accounts or take advantage of a seasonal promotion.

How Safe Are We?

There’re no telling what criminals are going to strike back with, while companies may have the financial resources to develop advanced software to scout for criminal activity, the brainpower some criminals possess sometimes surpasses what a large organization is able to come up with. This leaves holes in some programs which hackers and other cybercriminals are able to exploit. We have to assume that there’s always going to be a threat lurking behind the curtain.

The post Gambling Abuse Prevented by Fraud Analytics appeared first on Analytics Insight.

The relentless growing threats of cyber-attacks and data breaches have made cyber threat management a business imperative. Across diverse industries, businesses are looking for effective cybersecurity solutions to safeguard digital assets and ensure the protection of their customers’ information. Effective cybersecurity requires organizations to bring a strategic cyber culture that will help spread awareness among employees to understand cyber threats. This is imperative because most of the breaches occur due to internal errors, whether by the workforce or internal networks.

As from C-suite to various department managers play an integral role in securing their organizations, many are still grappling with how to make this role more effective. This is why most business leaders are actively looking for professionals with cybersecurity knowledge to keep run their businesses safely and smoother. But, the demand of professionals by companies is far greater than the supply of cyber talent pool which is creating a major lack of cyber talent.

In a global study of over 2,000 cybersecurity professionals, technology professional association ISACA in its report titled “State of Cybersecurity 2020” found that many enterprises are short-staffed, have difficulty in identifying enough qualified talent for open positions, and do believe their HR teams do not adequately understand their hiring needs. As per the report, 57 percent of enterprises have unfilled cybersecurity positions on their team at present. The report has further emphasized on diversity while hiring cybersecurity professionals. It noted that there is still a considerable gender gap as there are more men than women in most teams.

As the landscape of cybersecurity continues growing, cyber teams within an organization continue to struggle with identifying resources with the right skill sets. According to the ISACA report, most respondents said having a degree does not necessarily indicate that a candidate is ready for the job, while just 27 percent of respondents consider recent graduates in cybersecurity are well-prepared. Meanwhile, 95 percent believe hands-on experience is the top qualification necessary while hiring candidates, along with hands-on training is crucial for including professionals in their team as 81 percent reported.

Since the ongoing threats of COVID-19 around the world have already sent employees to work from home, the dynamics of a decentralized workforce has given rise to cyber risks. In this scenario, organizations must find the balance between the need to strengthen network capacity to house increased remote traffic and the imperative to secure systems, networks and data. They also need to acquire more talents in order to ensure security in such a crisis.

Despite these demands, the deficiency of cyber talent remains challenging for enterprises as cybersecurity ventures estimations show the number of unfilled cybersecurity jobs will grow by 350 percent to reach 3.5 million by 2021.

However, to address the growing need of recruiting and retaining cybersecurity talent, businesses must rethink training and professional development opportunities that can help contribute to career advancement. They should focus on encouraging continuous learning and seek out for new technologies as well. Hiring candidates with diverse, non-traditional backgrounds can also have a significant impact on an organization’s cyber initiative as they can easily be trained in cybersecurity to make a great fit with the company.

Although, the skills gap in the cybersecurity world is not going anytime soon as it requires much more strategy, planning and investment to ensure long-term efforts in this field.

The post Bridging Skills Gap in the Evolving Cybersecurity Landscape appeared first on Analytics Insight.

When customers give their personal information to companies, they entrust them with personal data which can be used against them if it falls into the wrong hands. That’s why data privacy is there to protect those customers but also companies and their employees from security breaches.

Complying with data privacy regulations is important not just because sensitive information can be misused in case a data breach occurs, but also because there are laws which enforce this compliance.

This article will give you the basic information on complying with data privacy regulations. However, if you want to find out all the details, take a look at a few of our recent reports. Going through them will equip you with enough knowledge to stay on the safe side of data privacy compliance.

Why is data privacy important?

Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay

One of the main reasons why companies comply with data privacy regulations is to avoid fines. Organizations that don’t implement these regulations can be fined up to tens of millions of dollars and even receive a 20-year penalty.

However, there are many more reasons why you need to take data privacy seriously, not just because the law says so.

Data breaches could hurt your business

When you comply with data privacy regulations, you need to meet certain legal requirements. One of those requirements is implementing strong security safeguards to ensure the protection of data privacy.

With these measures, the number of security threats will significantly decrease and your business won’t suffer a loss of revenue. The average total cost of a data breach is $3.92 million, which can be easily avoided with well-placed regulations.

Protecting your customers’ privacy

As mentioned before, a data breach can lead to theft of valuable customer information, which can negatively impact the data owners. A hacker can use all of that sensitive information to commit various crimes such as identity theft and credit card fraud.

Maintaining and improving brand value

You need to avoid data breaches, as they can seriously damage a company’s reputation and brand value. When customers voluntarily give their data to companies, they expect it to be well-protected. If it’s not, customers will lose all trust they had in the company and brand, which will decrease brand value.

It supports the code of ethics

Most organizations have a code of ethics in place. Even those that don’t have it follow at least certain ethical practices. Without this, they wouldn’t be able to stay in business. One of those policies states that confidential information needs to be handled responsibly and only used for business purposes.

It gives you a competitive advantage

A lot of people are concerned about how their data is being used and handled. Surveys have shown that 79% of people are very or somewhat concerned about how companies are using their data. Additionally, 81% of people believe they have little or no control over their own data.

If your business complies with data privacy regulations, this will give you a competitive advantage over companies that don’t take the matter as seriously.

How to make sure your business complies with regulations

If your organization hasn’t already set up a systematic compliance effort, it’s time to do it right away. Even though it will take you time and effort, it’s something that needs to be done as soon as possible.

Develop a compliance strategy

You can’t hope to accomplish anything without a good overall compliance strategy. This strategy needs to have data privacy compliance at its core while also being comprehensive, measurable, and integrated.

You can develop it with a high-level set of principles that will be followed with the appropriate documentation. Make sure to define all measures that need to be taken to protect personal data.

Hire compliance subject matter experts

Since there are a plethora of regulations that require compliance, it’s almost impossible to keep track of them all. That is why there are experts trained in the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations.

These people are called subject matter experts (SMEs) and you can either hire or train one whose only job will be to develop legally compliant policies and practices. With a dedicated SME, you can be sure that you’re always complying with regulations.

Make an inventory of all sensitive personal information

Whenever personal data is collected, it needs to be properly tagged and inventoried. Your company also needs to provide a tracking method for all data that will make it easier to locate and protect. All of this needs to be in accordance with recommended and legal standards.

Establish policies and procedures for data protection

Organizations that comply with data privacy regulations have to ensure integrity, confidentiality, and data availability with physical, technical, and administrative safeguards. These safeguards need to be effective in detecting and stopping unauthorized access to data.

It’s also vital to constantly monitor, assess, and update information security to make sure new threats can be met and dealt with properly and efficiently.

Have a response plan for dealing with breaches

Even if you adhere to all compliance policies, your system can’t be completely protected from data breaches and cyber-attacks.

That is why every organization needs to have an effective response plan for data breaches as well as employees who are trained on these breach response plans.

Save all documentation

As we already mentioned, all compliance processes and plans need to have proper documentation. It’s important to keep this documentation readily available with a good content management system. You should also have an employee who is responsible for managing these documents.

Be ready to provide proof of compliance

It’s not enough for you and your employees to know the organization is data privacy compliant. You need to be ready to show proof of compliance to all internal and external queries. Make this proof readily available and easily accessible in document and report forms to anyone who wants to see it.

Your organization also needs to have a set process for reporting non-compliance and an escalation plan. Additionally, you need to prove that you’re continually adherent through auditing, monitoring, and use of controls.

Final thoughts

People all over the world have been concerned about data privacy for a while now, and they have good reasons for it. Data breaches, security threats, and cybercrime can lead to negative and even harmful consequences, so it’s very important to comply with data privacy regulations.

Remember that your customers trust you with very sensitive information and if you break that trust, your company will cease to exist very soon. However, as long as you comply with data privacy regulations, you will save your business and your reputation, but also avoid some big fines.

The post Why Data Privacy Is Important and How to Comply with Regulations appeared first on Analytics Insight.

Cybersecurity is an essential concern for SMBs, but numerous small and medium-sized businesses fail to secure their organizations because of certain limitations.

According to a report, more than half of the SMBs have experienced cyber-attacks and a data breach. As a result, most SMBs are focusing on the importance of a healthy security posture.

In 2018, almost two-thirds of the SMBs faced at least some type of cyber-attacks. With the evolution of the internet, hackers have come up with more sophisticated techniques to reach a vast target audience than ever.

The security breaches bring devastating effects for the SMBs, and only a few of them manage to survive. The National Cyber Security Alliance reveals approximately 60% of all the SMBs came to know about the attack within six months.

Either your business operates online or has a specific website to carry out its functions, always consider the strategies to improve cybersecurity infrastructure. Drafting and implementing an excellent cybersecurity plan is essential for your organization to protect data, credit card numbers, passwords, and other information in the era of the web.

Nathan Finch, a former network security engineer at Australia’s Cyber Defense Group, advises:

“Make sure you choose a secure web hosting provider for your business’ website. That’s the number one rule to avoid common cybersecurity threats and risks. Make sure you choose a web hosting provider that comes with an SSL certificate, ‘cause that’s one of the most important factors to consider when it comes to security and SEO of modern websites. SSL certificate protects sensitive data that’s sent between computers and servers, such as passwords, or credit card numbers. If your site is not encrypted properly it becomes an easy target and puts it at risk of hacking attempts and identity thefts.”

With that in mind, we can move forward and explain some other ways to protect your business. If you own a small business, then it is the right time to restructure your security posture. Let’s now discuss some of the ways SMBs should follow to prevent themselves from cyber-attacks.

Vulnerable Hardware Provide an Edge to Cybercriminals

SMBs need to understand the importance of protecting their hardware the same as their software. It’s necessary to secure all the hardware devices and software networks with the latest security solutions available and keep them updated.

Most SMBs fail to secure the business hardware that can later cost them at the time of cyber-attack. For small businesses, theft or loss in the business hardware can be as dangerous as it is equal to a data breach.

Thus, business leaders ensure that only authorized employees are given access to the integrities of business hardware. Besides creating a firewall for accessing confidential information, SMBs should deploy multi-factor authentication for people trying to access their hardware devices and surveillance systems.

Understand the Changing Landscape and Trends

SMBs need to develop a comprehensive security strategy to prepare the company and employees to fight cybercriminals. Business leaders need to have a prior understanding of potential vulnerabilities. Let it be the external or internal issues that can impact their business and how hackers can gain entry, including various methods and points of weakness.

Experts believe that cyber-attacks happen because of having a weak security system or firewall system to fight against cyber-attacks. Hence, learning about different types of cyber fraud techniques and common threats is vital.

It includes everything from phishing and spoofing attacks to system hacking and pharming. Having a proper understanding of the working landscape helps the SMBs to plan their motives ahead of the attacks.

SMBs also ensure that all of their employees are aware of the changing cybersecurity situations, so they don’t mishandle sensitive business information. Assuring all these points helps the SMBs to create comprehensive and robust strategies to protect their business from possible attacks.

Some of the most common cyber-attacks methods to be aware of include hacking, identity thefts, malware threats, phishing, and social engineering attacks.

Use a VPN

Any investment in cybersecurity tools for the office falls by the curb if any employee working remotely gets hacked. Invest in a highly rated and well-reviewed VPN service as the first line of defense against cyber-crooks and attacks.

SMBs must use VPNs for all their remote employees. VPNs provide the same level of protection as those in the office. Using a VPN means that your entire traffic passes through secure and encrypted tunnels and hides your data from all snooping eyes.

With the start of the present pandemic, the cyber-criminals have not left any chance to hack remote employees working from home networks. So, use a VPN and protect yourself.

Use Cloud Software

It’s vital to update all your apps and cybersecurity software to ensure that you’re using the most secure version of the software. Hackers are always looking for methods to infiltrate the programs. When you use the latest versions of your cybersecurity software, you remain one step ahead or make it hard for the attackers to steal your data.

Cloud software is beneficial in this case because the cloud-based applications update themselves regularly. As a consequence, all these apps are more robust to attacks. As the SMBs owners manage multiple tasks at a single time, auto-updating software ensures that they don’t forget when it comes to updating the software.

Email Encryption

Encryption assures that the hackers won’t be able to access the email information. Whether email breaching happens or not isn’t guaranteed in email encryption. However, it makes it difficult for hackers to infiltrate them.

Encrypted emails use critical public key infrastructure (PKI) that utilizes both public and private keys to hide and protect sensitive information.

By using a dedicated business email service that comes with encryption, companies and enterprises send emails through private infrastructure. The private structure uses private digital codes while the public key encrypts email by making it unreadable with the private key.

Employee Training

After establishing a company-wide cybersecurity strategy, it’s vital to train your employees so they know what they’re up to and what they can do to save themselves.

Ask your employees to use strong passwords and the best password managers, as it makes it difficult for hackers to access your accounts. Educate them on the various types of cybersecurity attacks. Doing this will help in detecting phishing attempts as well as other common scams.

Use Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware Software

It’s essential to educate and train your employees on how to defend themselves from cyber-attacks. However, some cyber-attacks are successful because the device won’t have any robust line of defense.

For this purpose, download and use anti-malware and antivirus software on all your company devices. Once downloaded, update each security software regularly. Some anti-virus software auto-update themselves, which is quite helpful for small and medium business owners because it is one less thing they’ve to keep track of.

If any individual works remotely or travels with their devices, ensure that their devices are well protected outside the office network.

Upgrade Your IT Structure with New Equipment

When it comes to maximizing and boosting your network security, upgrading the latest cyber defense equipment is essential. Firewall devices, routers, and other IT tools maximize your system security to prevent hackers from gaining entry. Since hackers influence these cutting-edge techniques; thus, these upgrades are crucial.

Several organizations consider IT equipment as a second thought or time expensive. However, the reality is a much different thing. Upgrading and replacing this equipment with modern hardware strengthen your network security.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, don’t allow hackers to gain access to your business network. Prioritize your organization’s cybersecurity policy. Make a plan, deploy it, train your employees, and be cautious regarding keeping your software updated.

Among anti-virus software and some common-sense measures, any SMB can reduce cyber-attacks, but it’s essential not to let your digital security become an afterthought. Till then, follow the tips mentioned above and stay secure.

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Master these Top 5 Programming Languages for Unbeatable Cybersecurity Defense

Cybersecurity has become a critical concern for individuals and organizations in the rapidly advancing digital landscape. Cybersecurity professionals must possess a solid foundation in programming languages as the complexity and frequency of cyber threats continue to escalate. This article will explore the top five programming languages essential for mastering cybersecurity: Java, Python, C/C++, Ruby, and HTML. The cybersecurity community has widely recognized these languages for their versatility, security features, and robustness.

1. Java: The Foundation of Secure Applications

Java, a widely used programming language, is a robust and reliable choice for cybersecurity professionals. It’s platform independence and robust security features are ideal for developing secure applications and network protocols. Java offers a secure execution environment and provides extensive libraries and frameworks like Spring Security and Apache Shiro, which enable the implementation of authentication, access control, and encryption mechanisms. The prominence of Java in enterprise-level systems and its focus on security make it a crucial language for cybersecurity professionals.

2. Python: The Swiss Army Knife of Cybersecurity

Python’s simplicity, readability, and versatility have made it one of the most popular programming languages across various domains, including cybersecurity. Its extensive collection of libraries and frameworks, such as Scapy, Requests, and PyCrypto, provides cybersecurity professionals with a vast array of tools. Python is ideal for network scanning, vulnerability assessment, and malware analysis. Its ease of use and integration capabilities make it an excellent choice for automating security tasks and scripting. Python’s flexibility and wide adoption in the cybersecurity community make it an essential language.

3. C/C++: Building Strong and Secure Systems

C/C++ remains an indispensable language for low-level programming and system development, making it highly relevant in cybersecurity. While it requires a deeper understanding and meticulous coding practices, C/C++ offers granular control over system resources and memory, making it ideal for developing secure operating systems, firmware, and device drivers. Many critical security applications, including popular security libraries like OpenSSL, are written in C/C++. Its performance, control, and ability to interact with hardware make it an invaluable language for cybersecurity professionals working on critical systems.

4. Ruby: The Elegance of Web Security

Ruby, known for its simplicity and expressiveness, has gained recognition within the cybersecurity community. Its elegant syntax and powerful frameworks like Ruby on Rails enable rapid development of secure web applications. Ruby’s focus on readability and productivity makes it a suitable language for penetration testing, where time is often of the essence. Ruby’s metaprogramming capabilities also allow for the creation of flexible and extensible security tools. With its balance of elegance and functionality, Ruby is a valuable addition to a cybersecurity professional’s toolkit.

5. HTML: The Language of Web Security

HTML is the backbone of web development and is crucial in cybersecurity. Understanding HTML is essential for securing web applications and preventing common vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and injection attacks. Cybersecurity professionals proficient in HTML can effectively analyze and assess web application security, ensuring the implementation of proper defenses against potential threats. HTML’s structure and syntax are relatively easy to grasp, making it an accessible language for individuals entering the cybersecurity field.

In Conclusion

The top five programming languages to learn for cybersecurity—Java, Python, C/C++, Ruby, and HTML—provide a solid foundation for professionals seeking to excel in this field. Each language offers unique strengths and capabilities that cater to different aspects of cybersecurity, ranging from application development to low-level system control and web security. Investing time and effort into mastering these languages will equip you with the essential tools needed to protect and secure the digital world. Stay curious, keep learning, and embrace the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity.

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As Data synergies get more recognised, Cyber Security Certifications will be in great demand in the 21st Century

Cybersecurity is an expansive field, integrating application security, networks, information security, cyber espionage, biometrics together. The rise of cybersecurity certifications can be well ascertained by the rise of data threats and information security concerns.

Cybersecurity certifications are a great way to fast track your career especially in today’s times when COVID-19 has risen the dependency on the cloud. The best cybersecurity certifications can get you the requisite career gains. To chart your career to new heights, Analytics Insight has compiled the Best Cybersecurity Certifications available in both online and offline modules-

Exam AZ-500: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies

• Languages: English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), Korean

• Retirement date: none

• Cost- Price based on the country in which the exam is proctored

• Part of the requirements for: Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate

Azure security certification is designed for Microsoft Azure security engineers who are entrusted to implement security controls, manage identity and access, and protect the data, applications, and networks. Azure security certification is an associate-level certification aimed to enhance the user’s security knowledge and experience of collaborating with the different aspects of Microsoft Azure.

As industry surveys, AWS security certified professionals report an average annual income of US$114,000.

CISSP Certification

CISSP certification is meant for professionals and candidates who have prior experience of building safe systems and responding to a wide range of threats. The Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) exam is a six-hour exam covering 250 questions which certify security professionals in ten different aspects these include business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning, access control systems and methodology, management practices, telecommunications, physical security, operations, security and networking security. Other important specialization areas which the CISSP certification covers include security architecture application and systems development, law, ethics, cryptography and investigation.

Forbes reports that the average salary of CISSP certification holders in 2019 was $117,000.

CISM – Certified Information Security Manager

The CISM (Certified Information Security Manager) course is particularly popular in Europe and APEC, particularly into education and consulting industries. It is one of the best cybersecurity certifications preferred by professionals who are earning from US$80,000-US$150,000, a prior 3 to 5 years of work experience is required to pursue the CISM certification.

CEH – Certified Ethical Hacker from E-Council

The CEH (Certified Ethical Hacker) cybersecurity certification is popular among those who are working in the military, manufacturing, software, and telecommunications sectors. The CEH is particularly popular in the MEA (the Middle East and Africa) countries.

This cybersecurity certification covers 18 of the most up to date and important security domains an applicant would need to work on a career as an ethical hacker when they are looking to test how well an enterprise is prepared to counter attacks, besides, to improve the information security policies by identifying the potential loopholes in the enterprise’s IT network. This cybersecurity certification comprehensively covers over 270 attack methods and technologies which are commonly used by cybercriminals and hackers.

According to Forbes estimates, the average salary of those holding the CEH certificate in 2019 was US$116,000.

Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP)

OSCP is offered as an ethical hacking certification course, extremely popular among those who are in the income bracket of US$60,000 to US$80,000 in the APAC region, specifically in the mining and the pharma sectors. The offensive security certified professional certification trains users on testing tools and techniques via a 24-hour certification based on the real-world situation.

To earn this certification, users need to have an understanding of TCP/IP networking. Besides basic knowledge of Bash scripting with basic Python or Perl would be an additional plus.

How to choose the Best Cybersecurity Certification?

Choosing the best cybersecurity certification can be tough, especially when there is plethora of cybersecurity certifications as stated above. In addition to income and career gains, a basic understanding of cybersecurity is vital for all IT professionals. As the gap between the business and technology specialists begins to fade all stakeholders must have a foundational understanding of cybersecurity and the risks the rapidly changing technology possesses.

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