Just when cyber security professionals figure out how to combat and guard against one type of attack, another stronger malware attacks an unsuspecting — and unprepared — network. Newer, more evolved attacks are designed to skirt antivirus software and firewalls and access a targeted network.
Identity and access management tends to be a balancing act for information technology professionals. They want their networks to be secure, but they don’t want to deal with complaints from fellow employees that it is cumbersome and too time-consuming to log on to a network. For example, frequently changed, hard-to-remember passwords might be a hindrance to workers, but they often are crucial for blocking hackers from accessing a network.
With more and more data stored online these days, hackers have plenty of reasons to attack company networks to modify or steal data and even hold it for ransom. Cybint Solutions , a cyber security and legal support organization, estimates that a cyber attack happens every 39 seconds. This means that companies and websites are being bombarded by malicious users. It’s easier for information security professionals to thwart these attacks when they are launched head-on from the outside. Unfortunately, more and more attacks are occurring on the inside through social engineering, which makes them harder to predict and prevent.
Cloud computing is one of the hottest trends in IT today. Cloud adoption is at its peak, with 81 percent of cloud-using companies employing a multi-cloud approach and only 5 percent of companies not using any cloud solutions, according to Right Scale. The average company accesses about 5 private and public clouds, which can include AWS (64 percent of companies), Azure (45 percent), Google Cloud (18 percent), IBM Cloud (10 percent), VMware Cloud on AWS (8 percent), Oracle Cloud (6 percent) and Alibaba Cloud (2 percent), according to its “2018 State of the Cloud Report .”
As developers are tasked with churning out new applications in record amounts of time, cyber security professionals are left with less time to check for cyber security holes and protect these apps against hackers and other potential breaches. This means that apps often have lengthy windows of vulnerability until cyber security issues are uncovered and addressed. The 2017 “Application Security Statistics Report ” by WhiteHat Security reports that approximately 50 percent of applications are vulnerable every single day of the year.