Critical infrastructure security consists of the cyber-physical systems that modern societies rely on.
Common examples of critical infrastructure:
Electricity grid
Water purification
Traffic lights
Shopping centers
Hospitals
Having the infrastructure of an electricity grid on the internet makes it vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Organizations with responsibility for any critical infrastructures should perform due diligence to understand the vulnerabilities and protect their business against them. The security and resilience of this critical infrastructure is vital to our society’s safety and well-being.
Organizations that are not responsible for critical infrastructure, but still rely on it for a portion of their business, should develop a contingency plan by evaluating how an attack on critical infrastructure they depend on might affect them.
You should choose application security as one of the several must-have security measures adopted to protect your systems. Application security uses software and hardware methods to tackle external threats that can arise in the development stage of an application.
Applications are much more accessible over networks, causing the adoption of security measures during the development phase to be an imperative phase of the project.
Types of application security:
Antivirus programs
Firewalls
Encryption programs
These help to ensure that unauthorized access is prevented. Companies can also detect sensitive data assets and protect them through specific application security processes attached to these data sets.
As cyber security is concerned with outside threats, network security guards against unauthorized intrusion of your internal networks due to malicious intent.
Network security ensures that internal networks are secure by protecting the infrastructure and inhibiting access to it.
To help better manage network security monitoring, security teams are now using machine learning to flag abnormal traffic and alert to threats in real time. Network administrators continue to implement policies and procedures to prevent unauthorized access, modification and exploitation of the network.
Common examples of network security implementation:
Extra Logins
New Passwords
Antivirus programs
Firewalls
Incognito Mode
Monitored Internet access
Encryption
Most of the organizations are now inclined towards utilizing artificial intelligence to improve their businesses, enhance customer experience, and for efficient operations. With the plethora of data available at each step of organizational set-up, it becomes difficult for organizations to store these data in physical form. Also, it is observed that often this data is unstructured and is derived from unknown sources, which can cause a potential threat to the organization’s network. Hence, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud present their customers with a cloud computing platform, where the users can store, and monitor data, by implementing a security tool.
Reports suggest that on-premise environments are highly prone to cyber malware. By integrating the system with a cloud security platform, the users will be rendered with the secured data, thus mitigating the possibility of a cyber-attack.
The Internet of things is being observed to be the next tool for the technological revolution. A report by Bain and Company has estimated the market size for IoT to expand by US$520 billion by the year 2021. With the help of its security network, IoT provides the user with a variety of critical and non-critical appliances such as the appliances, sensors, printers, and wifi-routers amongst routers.
The report suggests that one of the main obstacles for implementing IoT in any organization is the threat to security. By integrating the system with IoT security, organizations are provided with insightful analytics, legacy embedded systems, and secure network.