The First Step to Cybercrime Diagnosis: Accept your Infection!
This might sound like a healthcare discussion but the comparison actually makes sense. For a moment, relook at cyber threats—they are like a chronic disease, invasive and capable of rendering long-term damages. Ghostware or Blastware, you are looking at an IT infection that is carcinogenic, highly toxic and self-sustaining. Diagnosing it is not easy. By the time you realize that critical data has been leaked, hacked or accessed illegally, the damage has been done and little can be done to redeem the lost data or its integrity. A malware infection can be benign, out of range from detection tools. For instance, a strange hard drive activity might indicate a virus at work. Hard drives that continue to show heavy usage even when not in use might have a malware at work. However, all IT teams don’t identify such malware-at-work possibilities. This ACCEPTANCE will pave the way for realigning your IT team or hiring a technology solutions vendor who can provide a more structured approach to preventing cybercrimes BEFORE they happen.
Proceeding with Cybercrime Recovery, Rehabilitation & Boosting Immunity
What do we mean by a methodical approach? Cyberthreats will continue to outperform and overpower the best of IT security practices. So, don’t expect an immediate and future-proof cure. There is only one way to ensuring your data remains protected, your workflows are not disrupted and business-critical processes that involve business associates, vendors, or remote vendors don’t compromise on cybersecurity. For this you need to set-up a plan— we are sharing the blueprint with you: After you have acknowledged the fact that your enterprise is vulnerable, discuss the possible security issues with your on premise IT team. Most in-house teams are not ready for this brutal reality-check. Consider investing in controlling the immediate symptoms caused by malware, like slowdowns and unauthorized access if you are already under attack. Consider resolving the problem at the grassroots—a more holistic treatment where cybersecurity specialists, surveillance-based platforms and future-proofing software come into the mix.
Tip: If you are struggling with self-introspection, you should consider professional IT system evaluation firms. This reality-check will help you understand how cyber threats are evolving, becoming grave and feeding off passive IT teams that lack pro-activeness, skill and knowledge for effective anti-malware protocols.
Sandboxing to Become Malware-Proof? …Are you Serious?
Many corporations are sold on the idea of Sandboxing—a not-too-recent phenomenon where any new software is comprehensively tested in a safe environment before being migrated to the enterprise networks. Some CIOs believe that Sandbox provides the type of unrelenting inspection that is necessary to capture possible points of susceptibility. Accordingly, the manner in which the specific software reacts can be tuned to ensure better, more perceptive behavior that proofs against the threat. However, Sandboxing does not deserve the faith it is creating, especially among key decision-makers. It is effective but cannot reveal all the susceptible points of a malware invasion. Malevolent software creators are equipping themselves with better, surveillance-defying, smartly morphing codes!
In the next and final installment, we discuss prevention strategies for cyber security attacks.