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Cyber Attacks Are More Fine-tuned Towards Specific Individual

Sanjay Ramnath & Murali Urs
Senior Director, Product Management & Country Manager, -Barracuda Networks , India
Monday, September 28, 2015
Sanjay Ramnath & Murali Urs
With escalating level of sophistication in cyber threats, there has been a new accumulation of vendors to counter threats that bypass antecedent technologies. Security aficionados across the world are trying to figure out the technology to avenue around surveillance. However, as per the current trends, the attack landscape has become crucially complex today, as the present attacks are multi-vector in nature that target multiple entry points of a network or specific entities within a network.
Having encryption is ineffective against a sophisticated hacker unless sturdy measures are taken to assure those keys. The winds have shifted to a point, where the attacks are more fine-tuned towards a specific individual. It becomes increasingly challenging to retort instantly to such attacks, as they are not rampant. This calls for the security fanatics to be more sophisticated and smarter during threat scrutinization in order to safeguard networks.
There is slow but sure migration towards cloud, where all the trivial data and mission-critical applications such as CRM are stored in a common space. The trivial data affects the network performance, thus impacting your critical data. Hence, the whole security devices, as we knew it, are changing slowly to make a network perform dynamically well. The answer to securing data is not just about blocking or keeping back staff anymore.
As the line between business computing and social computing is vanishing slowly, every part of an organization's security solutions including infrastructure and firewalls should be able to protect the mobile devices. At Barracuda, we have embraced the challenging BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy. We cannot lock your systems despite the fact that you have complete access to all our resources, so we leverage the cloud orchestration mechanism by which we can manage the clients, monitor the devices, extend security cluster by these devices and also the users that are outside the network perimeter. This trend is slowly ramping up and it is forcing vendors to integrate mobility in all the spaces.
Recommendations to Financial Sector and Startups
Infrastructure planning, Infrastructure management and user awareness are the three pillars of the security posture. We provide our clients a framework and ecosystem that allows them to think about security proactively. The environment is so complex that the attack has multiple bridge points and legacies to keep up with.
There is a common misconception among startups that they are not attractive enough to get hacked. As launching an attack has become almost a child's play, no one is safe today. Hence, we advise them to think of a holistic picture of their infrastructure and be geared up to tackle attacks. Don't wait for a regulatory act. If you don't think about it now, it is going to be very expensive at some point in time.
Threats are targeting specific entities such as individuals, organizations and applications, so a good chunk of our effort in terms of developing security steps is steered towards providing the right set of tools and capabilities to analyze them in a more focused and besieged way. We are deploying all solutions as hardware, virtual appliances, deploying firewalls and email solutions in the public as well as private clouds.
Safeguarding Internal Data
Protecting internal data from attackers requires a combination of policy and awareness. For instance, in earlier days, you had to ensure that spam does not enter the network but now you need to have a data leakage policy and ensure enough regulations on firewall. If somebody tries to leak some essential data from the company, you can catch him on the gateway. With the assistance of a team of more than 100 security experts, we see compliance as a big emerging story coming from new verticals like manufacturing. Along with these new sectors, we will also continue to grow in hospitality and healthcare verticals and adopt latest technologies. We need to ensure that we keep your information safe irrespective of the crunches that may arise at that point of time. (As told to Anamika Sahu & Susila Govindaraj)
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