When the entire world is dreading about the pandemic, it’s an exciting time for hackers as there are more vulnerable opportunities to attack identity and access vectors.

In this article, we will talk discuss the fundamentals of cybersecurity, the trends, challenges, and the numerous opportunities to leverage them.

What Is Cybersecurity?

It’s not just about digital or just for Information Technology. It’s all about people, processes, and technology coming together to protect “systems” against “attacks” and ensuring Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability

• In cybersecurity, it’s important to view the system holistically as a supply chain than focusing on individual components in silos. Systems include all components such as Networks, Infrastructure, Operating Systems, Applications/Programs, Containers, Devices, Organizations, Individuals, Data, and many more.
• Confidentiality defines rules that restrict access to data and information. It’s about maintaining privacy and protecting the system.
• Integrity is maintaining the accuracy and completeness of data and information throughout the life cycle of the system. The key here is to ensure the data is consistent and trustworthy over the period.
• Availability is assuring that the data and information are accessible whenever it’s required by authorized users.

While an ‘attack’ or ‘threat’ can impact either one or all three key elements in cybersecurity, it’s important to understand the active and passive attacks and how they differ from threats so that the mitigation plan can be implemented appropriately.

Attacks and Threats

An active attack such as brute force attack (this is one of the culprits why we are being asked to change password often that too with so much emphasis on complexity and uniqueness), email spoofing, phishing/smishing (current trend of sending fraudulent SMSes that trick us into clicking on malicious links), denial of service and viruses attempt to alter a system or accept operations that compromise integrity and availability.

A passive attack such as keystroke logging, computer/network surveillance attempts to gain access or make use of information from the system but does not affect system resources. This eventually compromises confidentiality.

While attacks are deliberate, threats such as interception, interruption, modification, and fabrication can be intentional or unintentional. To give an example, while building an application, a developer may unintentionally write a code segment that’s vulnerable to malware and other potential flaws.

Due to the nature of threats, it comparatively hard to detect than an attack. That’s one of the reason, threat analytics is booming with a lot of challenges and opportunities.

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