by Norman Halls, contributor
Security breaches are caused by the nonexistence of training and the ability to identify complications. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has embraced business’, small and large, that used computer-controlled systems. Computer to control a process has a number of important advantages over controlling the same process manually. Computer systems respond more quickly than humans. A computer system can take readings from sensors and turn devices on and off many thousands of times a second. During this time the greatest threat can take place. Breaches can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Threats to individual computers, industrial systems, utilities and other users of these systems may be hesitant to adopt security.
Ginni Rometty, IBM’s CEO said: “We believe that data is the phenomenon of our time. It is the world’s new natural resource. It is the new basis of competitive advantage, and it is transforming the very profession and industry. If all of this is true – even inevitable – then cybercrime, by definition, is the greatest threat to every profession, every industry, every company in the world.”
“Organizations need to increase their defenses and become more resilient because there is no end in sight for the growing cybercrime epidemic.” Said Robert Herjavec
Tom Corn, senior vice president of security products at VMware said “With the alignment cycle, organizations go through a period where it is extremely difficult to align defenses properly against the assets that need to be protected,” “When that happens, security costs go up and effectiveness goes down.” Corn continued, “With micro-segmentation, it makes it very difficult for an attacker to go from the initial point of entry to the high-value assets” Corn said “What we can’t have is that if someone breaks in and has one key, that one key should not be the key to the kingdom; we need to compartmentalize the network such that a breach of one system is not a breach of everything you have.”
Would you believe that more than half of security breaches are now caused by employees inside the impacted organization? It’s true–not necessarily because these employees are determined to cause harm, but rather due to negligence. In the Threat Monitoring, Detection and Response Report, 48% of the 400 IT pros surveyed by Dtex claimed that detecting and mitigating insider threat was one of their top concerns. The biggest fear? An inadvertent data breach or compromise (64%). The growing threat is largely due an increasingly mobile workforce, with employees bringing a diverse set of their own devices and smartphones onto the corporate network.
The assumption by many would rank credit unions, banks and financial services as the number one Cyber target. According to a report by the Cybersecurity, Healthcare is number 1, 2nd Manufacturing, 3rd Financial Services, 4th Government and 5th Transportation.
Cyberattacks struck hospitals and health systems at an alarming rate this past year — nearly exceeding the rate of one breach per day. In fact, “the Identity Theft Resource Center found the U.S. medical and healthcare sector experienced roughly 336 data breaches as of Nov. 29, which represents 28 percent of the total 1,202 breaches. That equates to 4.93 million records exposed, or 2.9 percent of the total 172 billion records that have been exposed so far in 2017.” Reports Julie Spitzer of Becker’s Hospital Review
The time of the Internet and technology has brought both frequent benefits along with some menaces. Business owners have been victims of cyberattacks. While governments, businesses and individuals are all being targeted on an exponential basis, infrastructure is becoming a target of choice among both individual and state-sponsored cyber-attackers, who recognize the value of disrupting what were previously thought of as impassable security systems.
