How Cybersecurity Works?

Cyber security is defined as the collection of methods, technologies, and processes used to help protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of computer systems, networks, and data from cyber-attacks or unauthorised access. The primary goal of cyber security is to protect all organisational assets from both external and internal threats, as well as natural disaster disruptions. Let’s have a look at how cybersecurity works

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Cybersecurity and Its Subdomains

Application security entails implementing various defences against a wide range of threats within all software and services used within an organisation. To reduce the likelihood of unauthorised access or modification of application resources, secure application architectures must be designed, secure code must be written, strong data input validation must be implemented, threat modelling must be implemented, and so on. Some of the domains are as follows:

Data Security and Identity Management
Network Safety
Mobile Safety
Disaster recovery and business continuity planning in the cloud
Education of the user

Importance and Challenges of cybersecurity

Given the rapidly evolving technological landscape and the increasing adoption of software across various sectors such as finance, government, military, retail, hospitals, education, and energy, to name a few, more and more information is becoming digital and accessible through wireless and wired digital communication networks, as well as the ubiquitous internet.

Recent high-profile security breaches demonstrate the importance of good cyber security strategies at organisations such as Equifax, Yahoo, and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which lost extremely sensitive user information, causing irreparable damage to their finances and reputation. And, as the trend indicates, the rate of cyber-attacks is not slowing down.

What Exactly is a Cyber-Attack?

A cyber-attack is a deliberate attempt by external or internal threats or attackers to exploit and compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of a target organization’s or individual’s information systems (s). Cyber-attackers employ illegal methods, tools, and approaches in order to cause damage and disruptions or gain unauthorised access to computers, devices, networks, applications, and databases.

Difference between cyber-attack and security breach

A cyber-attack is not the same thing as a security breach. A cyber-attack, as defined above, is an attempt to compromise a system’s security. Attackers use various types of cyber-attacks, as described in the preceding section, to try to exploit the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a software or network. In contrast, a security breach is a successful event or incident in which a cyber-attack compromises sensitive information, unauthorised access to IT systems, or service disruption.