It is no longer a matter of if an organization is going to be victimized by cybercrime, but when. Be they crimes of opportunity or indiscriminate malware campaigns, chances are more than likely that malicious hackers are standing right outside any given firewall, actively trying to find a way in.
This is why there needs to be a greater interest from those outside of the IT department regarding effective security practices and assets. Management needs to be involved in the planning and execution of these strategies, and other employees need to be informed about what constitutes secure activity.
“In this new cyber landscape, even biomedical devices like insulin-injection pumps and pacemakers are potential targets to old adversaries – spies, criminals, warriors and terrorists – with new and advancing technologies,” wrote Nextgov contributor Frank Knokel. “Defending against and mitigating attacks from such formidable, agile adversaries is perhaps the grandest challenge in cybersecurity today, yet the organizations best equipped to clear those hurdles are the ones that treat cybersecurity as more than an information technology issue.”
Cost of cybercrime can be hundreds of billions of dollars
The Center for Strategic International Studies recently conducted a survey in an attempt to financially quantify the losses that organizations take on average as a result of cybercrime. The research firm found that over $400 billion has been lost all over the world, with $100.4 billion being spent exclusively in the wake of U.S. breaches.
“Valuing IP is one of the hardest problems for estimating the cost of cybercrime, but it is not impossible,” CSIS wrote in the report. “As cybertheft of IP becomes a recognized part of the business landscape, we can expect merger and acquisition specialists to develop better tools for evaluating both the risk of compromise and risk of successful exploitation by competitors.”
Cybersecurity must be a proactive affair
The biggest trouble when dealing with hackers is that, as protection methods get stronger, so do the attacks they are designed to prevent. Security is not a destination – rather, it is an ongoing process. There have to be provisions and considerations made that will allow security to be a constantly-evolving aspect of the company rather than a one-time issue that needs to be addressed in the moment.
Improved security should come at all levels, from employee education to the software-based defenses that are integral to every organization’s longevity. For those companies that need advanced protections, Faronics has an array of tools that can be leveraged to prevent cyberattacks, from the effective Anti-Virus offering to Anti-Executable, the application whitelisting software that keeps harmful programs that slip past the firewall from ever going to work in the first place.
What has to be remembered is that there is no single “cure-all” for cybersecurity. It takes a number of programs working side by side in order to gain an all-encompassing defense network. Thankfully, Faronics has a variety of offerings that can defend against countless grades of harmful software.
