When asking people about recent tech trends and events, their minds tend to shift to AI breakthroughs, quantum computing, and even Nvidia’s latest gaming GPUs. Ask about tech history, and in the majority of cases, they’ll proudly recollect their knowledge of milestones like Alan Turing’s “Imitation Game” found in his “Computer Machinery and Intelligence” book laying the first foundation of AI in the 1950s, or the official birth of the internet in 1983, or Apple revolutionizing the tech world by the release of the first iPad in 2010.
But here’s a question for you: Have you heard about the Heartbleed vulnerability breach in 2014? Or did you know that 700 million malware attempts were recorded in 2021 alone? Or even that according to Cybersecurity ventures, cyberattacks are deemed to cost companies a north of $10 trillion dollars by 2025, which was an increase from the $3 trillion in 2015. These are not trends or events – this is a genuine crisis.
Let me hit you all with a sobering reality – you might think major corporations are too fortified or immune to fall into the trap of cyber breaches, but the history tells a different story; in 2014, Heartbleed exposed a vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library which lead to massive leaks of personal information, and in 2017 WannaCry ransomware caused over $4 billion in damages affecting hospitals, businesses, and governments worldwide. All of these are just the tip of the iceberg, these are not isolated incidents – these are wake-up calls to all the companies present now and in the future.
As the digital landscape evolves, so do the risks. Innovations in AI, IoT, and cloud computing bring endless possibilities- but they also expand the surface of attack. Cybersecurity aids in the continuation of our day-to-day financial transactions, securing personal information, progression of businesses, safeguarding national security, and much more. Despite its importance, and the growth of threats, many organizations and businesses still see cybersecurity as a liability and even in some cases overthought and left till the end of the development phases prioritizing customer experience and speed over security leading to reactive strategies instead of proactive defense mechanisms. The paradox of cybersecurity lies in its invisibility, when it works, no one bats an eye, when it fails, the consequences are devasting.
As Kevin Mitnick – a former hacker and cybersecurity consultant once put it, “The question is not if you will be hacked, but when”. In the light of this, let’s explore practical and critical steps that aids in securing your infrastructures and businesses, whether on-premises or in the cloud and minimize the risks of a breach.
Strengthening Cybersecurity Frameworks with Multi-Factor Authentication and Encryption
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – MFA is a simple yet affective security mechanism; implementing MFA into your infrastructures adds an extra level of security by requiring users to provide multiple forms of verifications before accessing your systems decreasing unauthorized access. Forms like – OTPs (One Time Passwords), Email and authentication applications or devices codes, knowledge-based MFAs by providing information only the users know about, biometric authentication, and more made MFA more accessible than ever. Cloud providers such as AWS and Azure, made the implementation of MFA even more straightforward. For example, Azure Active Directory support conditional policies depending on the user location, device, and network, and AWS offers MFA with virtual authenticator apps or physical devices.
Encryption – encrypting data ensures that it will remain secure, transforming them to unreadable formats which only authorized parties are able to decrypt. Encryption in-transit ensures that even if the connection is intercepted by a “man in the attack”, your data remains unharmed. Cloud service providers often offer built-in encryption tools to help you secure your data; both AWS and Azure, support different built-in services to help manage the encryption of your data, such as AWS Key Management Service and Azure Key Vault. Azure, for instance, support both RSA 2048, RSA 3072, and other forms of transparent encryption for data at rest in their databases and supports customer managed encryption where you can manage the encryption of your data using your own encryption keys for maximum controls.
Invest in Threat Intelligence Tools and Regular Security Audits
Threat Intelligence tools – these are tools that aim to provide real-time insights into potential threats and possible areas of breaches, which enables organizations to proactively defend against cyberattacks and breaches. In cloud environments, threat intelligence can help identify and mitigate risks associated with shared resources and hybrid resources. In addition, cloud services provide several different services that aim to analyze your infrastructures against best practices and tests which highlight the parts that needs to be reinforced – such services include AWS GuardDuty, Micrsoft Defender Threat Intelligence for the cloud, and Google Chronicles.
Regular Security Audits – conducting comprehensive evaluations of your infrastructures aid in unveiling some hidden vulnerabilities and ensure that the resources and actions being done align with the compliances. Also, audits provide a room for recommendations to remediate and improve the environment to further secure it. AWS Trusted Advisor is built-in service from AWS that provides recommendations to optimize the performance and cost, Azure Advisor is another service that analyzes and provides recommendations to make your infrastructure more cost optimized and increase its performance, and Google Cloud Security Command Center that give comprehensive security and risk management platform for monitoring Google Cloud resources.
Prepare for Potential Regulatory Changes, Including Data Protection Laws (e.g., GDPR, CCPA)
Understanding Regulations – compliances and laws like the General Data Protection Regulations and the California Privacy Act are found to set strict standards for data privacy and security; these data protection laws protect the rights and the safety of the users against data breaches and leaks of their personal information. Non-compliant businesses to these laws, depending on the region you are present in, can result in hefty fines that can range from thousands to millions of dollars, reputational damages to the business, and even subject your business to penalties.
It is essential to understand how these regulations apply to your cloud services and ensure that your data handling practices ratify the required standards. Cloud Providers follow several different Data Protection Laws and offer compliance programs such as AWS Compliance Program, Azure’s Trust Center, and Google Cloud’s compliance framework; some of the laws that Cloud Providers follow are GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and PCI DSS for financial transactions.
Implement a Robust Disaster Recovery Plan and Conduct Regular Mock Drills
Disaster Recovery Plan – developing a disaster recovery plan is an essential step while designing your infrastructure. Some on-prem corporations tend to delay or ignore having a disaster recovery plans as it is expensive to replicate and maintain another on-prem environment in case of a failure. However, cloud providers support Disaster Recovery Plans from on-prem to the cloud and to their cloud environment from one region to another. Some of the disaster recovery services include Azure Site Recovery which aids in failing over from one region to another, and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery which aims to minimize downtime and data loss of on-prem and cloud-based applications.
Conducting Regular Mock Drills – simulating cyberattack scenarios helps to prepare the team and the environment to handle and respond cyberattacks during actual cyber breaches. These drills can identify the key weaknesses of your infrastructure and improve the coordination between team members. Not to mention that, testing failovers from one region to another or from the on-prem to the cloud failover is essential to make sure that the failover plan is feasible and able to accommodate actual server downs. Azure Site Recovery support a failover test where it performs the failover to the secondary region without affecting the main region, and AWS supports penetration testing, of course within guidelines, to test the infrastructure’s resiliency and availability against cyber-attacks and region outages.
Stay Updated with Security Patches
Systems and servers are becoming increasingly complicated due to various connections, intricate links, and complex communications between different environments. Not including the fact that virtually, there isn’t a flawless system; hence, regularly checking and updating your systems to patch vulnerabilities is crucial in preventing exploits, this includes applying patches to the Operating Systems, applications, virtual machines, and all your resources. The history proved that such incidents happened, this includes the previously mentioned Heartbleed security exploit and the shellshock incident exploiting a bug in the bash command -line.
With the cloud in sight, all these security patches can be taken care of by using managed services provided by multiple cloud venders, including AWS, Azure, and GCP. These venders are responsible for scaling, securing, and updating your resources while you focus your time and effort on developing your applications – using managed services can be more expensive than unmanaged resources, but it is a price worth to pay to protect yourself and your users from unintentional bugs due outdated patches leading to an exploit.
This checklist alone does not take into account all the measures and points needed to secure your infrastructure; beyond MFA, encryptions, and disaster recovery plans, there are additional steps that lie onto you and the users – raising awareness against malwares and phishing attacks, implementing high availability against DDoS threats, strengthening endpoint protections, and the list goes on. Securing your systems is an ongoing process that requires continuous vigilance and proactive strategies – this is not discouraging, it’s quite the opposite, delving into this world and knowing you are following all the necessary procedure to secure yourself and your environment brings some peace within.
Always remember, no system is invincible – you are only strong as your weakest link. Let’s take the next step toward securing your environment. At Digico Solutions, we’re dedicated to help you prioritize security alongside efficiency, ensuring you have a robust and resilient infrastructure. Let’s rewrite the narrative and build a secure future.
