How to protect your critical information?

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In a today’s world of constantly increasing cyber threats, we should try to figure out how to stay secure and protected. Cyber systems are not the places which bring you benefits only; they can also be the cause of a lot of concerns. A modern world became too sensitive on cyber threats, so what we need at the moment are good strategies and techniques on how to handle all that. A novel cyber security proposes three steps in a good cyber defence. They are prevention, monitoring and incident response. We plan to discuss all these in the coming lines. So, let’s begin!

Cyber Security – the Facts

A modern cyber security can be defined as a process of maintaining an acceptable level of cyber risk. So, security is about a risk management. It’s a never-ending process which requires you to invest new and new efforts in order to keep thing secure. Bad guys will always do bad things and good guys should find a way to respond to all of that. There are a lot of malicious persons in a cyber world – hackers, criminals, terrorist and security is the one which would be ahead of all in order to protect us from harm.

In a recent time, there are a lot of speculations in public on how potential cyber threats could affect us. There are more than 2 billions internet users in the world and from that point of view things are getting quite complicated. In the reality, everything based on emerging technologies can be affected – beginning from your PC, over electricity network, until satellite communications.

For such a reason, a good defence is something that we vitally need. That defence must be capable to put threats under control. It’s a hard task; it requires an investment of a lot of efforts, but it’s the only one that can offer as a long-term solution to the problem. It’s like putting things into order within some disordered environment. An entropy is something that exponentionally increases in this Universe, so we are supposed to work hard to make some parts of our reality organised. The same analogy can be done with a cyber environment. If we let a cyber system deal on its own, it will get disordered and insecure.

Why are Things Getting too Critical?

There is an infrastructure that is especially sensitive to threat. We call such an infrastructure the critical or the vital one. If anything would happen to that infrastructure, that would be a harm to entire country or nation. Good examples of those are telecommunications systems, traffic infrastructure, data centres, electricity systems and so on. The problem with such systems is they are so important for a normal everyday life of some place. The threat to that infrastructure could affect lives of many people.

In that sense, it is crucially significant to understand the threat in order to get protected from it. There are a lot of techniques and methods to get familiar with the issue. Modern security systems are mostly intelligence-driven, which means operations are well-prepared, information are well-analysed and strategies are well-developed. Things can appear as too critical at the beginning as there is not enough information provided, but as we are getting a better understanding of threat, our defence is getting clearer.

The Protection Scenarios

As mentioned above, there are three protection scenarios used nowadays. These are (1) prevention, (2) monitoring and (3) incident-response. A prevention is about avoiding bad things to happen to your system. On the other hand, a monitoring includes following and analysing what goes on within your environment, while an incident-response is the most complicated step and means how good you will react to protect your system as it is under attack.

Only a cyber system with all three activities combined can say for itself it is secure enough. The majority of current cyber environments follow this pattern.

Few Words at the End

As threats in our world are developing, security systems are progressing and getting better and smarter. The task of a good security is to always stay ahead a threat. This can seem as challenging through some phases of defence, but, at the end, good guys beat bad guys.

Reference:

[1] Scott Charney, Rethinking the Cyber Threat: A Framework and Path Forward, Microsoft, 2009