Securing technology in enterprises

Technology has revolutionized the entire business world. It has made the potential and imaginative possibilities a reality, up for grasp to anyone who deploys technologies in an innovative way.  It has empowered enterprises to provide unique services and products with the ability to satisfy the most difficult needs of customers. There is no limit to what technology can be put in use for, but the picture is not as rosy as one might think.

The use of technology comes with a great price and that is keeping the environments that facilitate the provision of technological services and products secure from the outsider attacks, commonly known as cybercrime or hacking. As businesses realize the importance of technology, many attackers have also realized its weak spots. These weak spots are exploited to access unsecured networks, push computer malware that infect the entire network and fraudulently retrieve confidential information, which could harm the continuity of any business.

These risks made businesses recognize the need for preventive measures. Several of these measures were deployed to monitor any potential threat through network communications. The most renowned is the security information and event management (SIEM) solution. SIEM combines log file collection, correlation and analysis with real-time security event monitoring.

Modern SIEM solutions go beyond log file searching to provide correlation and visualization tools to help security operations center (SOC) personnel spot patterns and anomalous behavior. Leading solutions use powerful analytics to detect advanced persistent cyber-attacks in mountains of security Big Data and provide the forensics analysis needed by the analytics-driven intelligent SOCs of the future.

SIEM solutions have been successful in detecting attacks and shortening their dwell time, so attackers exfiltrate less data. This has kept hackers on the move developing new approaches rather than relying on known attacks. It’s driven them to low-and-slow attacks more likely to avoid detection, and it has led them to focus on softer targets.

Nonetheless, because attackers are constantly looking for data to steal, why not bait them with fake data to detect and identify them? That’s a honey pot. Many are set up to for research purposes – to capture and analyze attacks and identify attackers. Others serve as a detection mechanism in production environments alerting defenders to hacker activity.

Deception grids simulate specific environments – like the design for your nuclear power plant or latest fighter jet. They are highly customized to convince attackers they have reached their target and in some cases feed them false data. Honey pots have been useful in identifying bad actors and their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. So they can keep attackers on the move, causing them to change or disguise their identity and network location.

As MySpace was created in 2003 and was the most visited social networking site until overtaken by Facebook in 2009 alongside other major social networking players such as Twitter and Instagram, the privacy of millions of people’s personal information was under a huge threat. While these measures attempt to mitigate or prevent certain attacks, protecting information that is meant to be published to the entire web is the biggest concern. 

According to a research by Ponemon Institute, it was identified that attacks by malicious insiders are the costliest kind of attack. And the theft of classified information from the US National Security Agency by Edward Snowden reinforces the need to detect insider threats and inappropriate access to information.

User behavior analytics looks for patterns of human behavior and can recognize meaningful deviations from normal patterns that suggest unauthorized data access, theft or fraud. Although many businesses tend to allocate great investments to implement security measures, not all would be in use when it comes to an exploitation of a security weak spot. 

Businesses must deploy layers of information security defenses that best match the threats to their enterprises. Also, they must ensure to innovate fearlessly to keep attackers on the move, not expecting the advanced measures put in place to prevent or detect and quickly respond to known and unknown attacks.