We live in a growingly networked world, including personal banking to government infrastructure. The world has been more connected than ever with the network of information, while information has been an essential resource for all businesses and is the key to the growth and success.
Making sure that companies have implemented security strategies to protect from cyber breaches is vitally important. The success of the businesses can be in jeopardy if enterprise security tactics are not involved in the business model.
The cyber risk is now considered at the top of the international listing as high profile breaches increase fear of endangering the business economy and subsequently global too. The cyber crime costs USD 400 billion to the global economy, according to a report.
Over 3,000 companies in the United States had compromised their systems in 2013 alone, and the number only included the companies that reported the breaches. While many companies avoid reporting the crimes keeping in mind the reputation of the company.
Many of the breaches targeted high profile US retailers and Home Depot and stole customer data and credit card information, while other companies lost money from accounts, and in some cases, criminals even took over the companies and demanded money to unlock them.
The cyber attacks are mainly categorized into- breaches in data security and sabotage. Personal data, trade secrets, intellectual property, prices and mergers, and bids related information fall in data security breach. Sabotage contains service attacks that flood web services with fake messages, and also conventional efforts to shut down the systems and infrastructure.
Only a few of the biggest cyber crimes get caught while many go untraced. A significant number of cyber crimes go undetected, considering industrial espionage where access to confidential data and documents of difficult to identify. A possible danger with this kind of breach is that companies might be at a disadvantage with trades for months or even years.
The migration of data to third party cloud providers has created a concentration of data in one place and thus, more opportunity for cyber criminals to create large damage in a single attack. The development of IoT that enables a machine to machine communication has also raised the possibility of appliances being manipulated by the cyber hackers.
Despite the best efforts of cyber security experts and government agencies, cyber crimes are likely to increase. The expanding number of availability of online services and the increasing sophistication of cyber criminals who want to play cat and mouse game with the security experts.
Today, 90 percent of companies are insufficiently prepared to protect their systems against cyber attacks globally. While the world is becoming more connected through a network of information, the protection of business systems from cyber crimes will be the main issue to tackle for many unprepared companies.
An implementation of a framework with a set of standards and best practices designed from an input of thousands of security experts will be the only way to protect and secure the businesses from cyber attacks.