Cybersecurity is the art and science of protecting computer systems and networks from the theft of electronic data, damage to hardware or software, or disruption of the services they provide.
The world now relies heavily on computers and networks to facilitate movement of a vast range of goods and services, and Cybersecurity has become more and more important.
Cybercriminals have developed many different forms of attacks, and they are becoming increasingly complex in the face of efforts to defeat them. Examples include:
- Denial-of-service attacks
- Eavesdropping
- Multi-vector attacks
- Phishing
- Spoofing
- Ransomware
- Direct-access attacks
- Backdoors
- Privilege escalation
- Keyloggers
- Viruses and Trojans
Over time, the industry has developed many different types of weapons to combat cyberattacks, from anti-virus programs to firewalls to endpoint security, SIEM and others. But to be effective, a Cybersecurity system should be able to spot and remediate any of these types of attacks across the entire attack surface.
There are three fundamental challenges in establishing effective Cybersecurity:
- A broad attack surface, where computers, servers, networks, cloud instances, and network endpoints are all targets.
- Data management – identifying cyberattacks involves collecting data from computers and networks, and it involves sifting through terabytes of data.
- Siloed tools – Cybersecurity tools have evolved rapidly over the past few decades, leading to a proliferation of different tools to protect against different types of attacks or to protect different attack vectors. With a dozen or more tools to manage in a typical enterprise environment, it becomes difficult to spot complex attacks that may span different vectors.
Let’s look at these challenges and potential solutions.
Broad attack surface:
A comprehensive Cybersecurity solution should be able to “see” the entire attack surface, from computer endpoints and applications to servers, networks, and the cloud. The majority of Cybersecurity products focus on one or at most a few of these vectors, rather than seeing the whole picture.
Data management:
Scanning for Cybersecurity attacks involves collecting server logs, endpoint logs, network traffic logs and cloud traffic logs, which amounts of multiple gigabytes of data per day in a typical midmarket enterprise. The cost of storing this data quickly gets out of hand. An efficient security system should be able to parse scanned data and store only the important subset of data for forensics.
Siloed tools
When a company has a dozen or more security systems in place, each has its own console. A multi-vector Cybersecurity attack might not show up as a problem in each discrete tool’s interface, and security analysts are left to manually correlate detections, which takes time – time in which an attack can become successful. An effective Cybersecurity solution should integrate many different Cybersecurity applications so analysts can work through a single pane of glass.
Cybersecurity is a large and constantly-evolving field. Hackers come up with new attacks daily or weekly, and Cybersecurity researchers develop tools to combat those attacks as they occur. The best approach is to use a Cybersecurity platform that incorporates plug-in applications which can be added to enhance the platform’s efficacy over time.
