Home » Cyber ​​attacks: what defenses to put in place and some companies that help facilitate those defenses

Cyber ​​attacks: what defenses to put in place and some companies that help facilitate those defenses

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Cyber ​​attacks: what defenses to put in place and some companies that help facilitate those defenses

Analysis by Rahul Bhushan, co-founder of Rize ETF

When you think of cybersecurity, you think of, to use a technical term, “super techy stuff,” including powerful computers, complex programming code, and all kinds of gadgets that would make James Bond headquarters (“Q “). While all of these characteristics may be true, let’s step back and boil things down to their basic elements.

Computer security is about maintaining the integrity of vital data, the process of securely sending and receiving a message, protecting the messenger and the message itself. It’s something that’s been going on since before the pyramids were built in ancient Egypt. It’s basically the same thing.

Is there confidence that the author of the message has not been compromised by bribery or other coercion? Is the sender trustworthy? Has the sender been bribed in some way to divulge the contents of the message to unknown parties or was he tricked into delivering a different message? Likewise, is the recipient of the message the right one?

All these ancient and analog situations have their modern digital equivalents. In this article, we’ll look at some of these types of attacks, the defenses against them, and some of the companies that help facilitate those defenses.

Protect the source of the message

In the days of filing cabinets, this wasn’t a problem, but in the digital age, the sheer amount of data hosted in corporate and government databases and the relative ease with which it can be transferred once accessed is astounding. This is where most of the offensive and defensive activity in the cybersecurity industry is concentrated. State-sponsored groups such as the Russian-backed “Cozy Bear” or “Fancy Bear,” the North Korean-sponsored “Lazarus Group,” the Chinese-backed “Double Dragon,” or the Iranian collective known as the “Helix Kitten” are causing an increasing number of attacks.

Not to be outdone, there is a group known as the “Equation Group” which has been tied to the US National Security Agency (NSA) and has been dubbed by Kaspersky Labs as one of the most sophisticated cyber-attack groups in the world. . Private groups like Lapsu$ and Killnet are all about money, usually through ransomware attacks, leaving the ideology to others.

There are also companies like Ahnlab Inc (053800), based in South Korea, Check Point Softwarebased in Israel, e Crowdstrike, based in the United States. These companies provide customers with a full suite of products and services ranging from basic email attachment screening to monitoring network traffic to employing so-called red and blue (and purple, yellow and white) teams to carry out real-time network penetration testing. Red teams are groups of (friendly) White Hats who are in the business of hacking into systems in any way they can. This can include social engineering through a phishing campaign or even calling employees directly to gather whatever information they can to help them figure out passwords or other ways to access systems. The blue teams take care of the defense against the red teams. The purple teams serve as a high-level review of the red and blue teams’ activities. Yellow teams are made up of any number of programmers, application designers or software engineers who can really dig into why vulnerabilities exist and how best to fix them. The white teams are responsible for supervising the penetration test activities, defining and managing the scope of the exercises.

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You may have heard of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The analog version of this type of attack is best described as organizing a flash mob to drive so many uninterested customers into a brick-and-mortar store that the store ceases to function. In the digital world, hackers spend their time building a network of machines they control, tricking users into downloading viruses while buying “free emoji packs” and other seemingly harmless items online. The hackers then use these controlled machines (“PWNDs”) to generate requests to the victim’s website at such a rate that the website cannot handle the number of requests and stops functioning. For a commercial website, this type of attack can be devastating.

Companies like Splunk Inc. they have made a name for themselves in the cybersecurity industry by becoming very good at handling extremely large amounts of data. Remember when we talked about “Big Data” and how difficult it was to manage them? Splunk was there from the beginning and built his company on the ability to not only manage data, but also collect and process it. In offering protection against DDoS attacks, Splunk captures and examines website traffic to determine what is real and what is generated by zombie machines or bots. To be clear, this happens in real time, not after the fact.

Secure the message path

Again, in the days of analog, a messenger’s route could determine not only how quickly the message was delivered, but also how dangerous the messenger might be in when traversing certain areas. The decentralized nature of the Internet means that communications between computers go through the simplest (fastest) route possible. Web users can open a DOS prompt and run a so-called traceroute to find out how many nodes, or “hops,” the request is routed through.

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Before companies like Fastly e Smart Technologies began to maintain geographically local copies of websites, the number of hops to make before finding the desired website was very large. The randomness of the message path opens up the possibility of an attack known as Man-In-The-Middle (MITM), where messages are observed or hijacked en route to their final destination.

Let’s talk about this final destination. When you type a website address into your browser, your computer takes what you recognize and translates it into something it recognizes, which is the IP address of that website. This works in the same way that you can tell an online map service to find Times Square, which will look up the following coordinates (40°45’27.83″ N -73°59’8.55″ W) and match them to a table human-readable to show “Times Square” instead of GPS coordinates.

This lookup table is known as Domain Name Services (DNS) and serves as the official guide for anyone trying to navigate to a website using the Universal Resource Locator (URL), or web address. If hackers were able to gain control of a DNS or direct users to their own DNS, they could lead users to fake websites as legitimate ones, as they could map a URL such as www.bankofamerica.com to their own version of that site, sit back and gather your account credentials at will. Companies like Surrender e Cloudflare they work to maintain accurate DNS and to keep each other’s mapping lists from interference.

Another aspect of what Cloudflare does crosses over from cybersecurity to the next area we’ll cover, data privacy and digital identity.

Protect the recipient of the message

Again, in the days of analog, protecting the identity of the messenger was sometimes critical to the delivery of the message, as well as the message itself. There are a large number of DNS mappings in use. Each Internet Service Provider (ISP) operates its own. This way, they can not only expedite inquiries, but also have a record of when and where their customers go online. Cloudflare offers a free anonymous DNS service that can be used by anyone who wants to keep their browsing habits to themselves. Service setup can be done through your favorite browser or, if you’re tech savvy, through your home router, so everything is automatically routed away from your ISP. If you’re tired of seeing ads for patio chairs three months after doing an innocuous search, then Cloudflare’s solution might be worth considering.

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Nowadays, the messaging service also acts as a destination, as it is through the users’ computers, cell phones and laptops that they send requests to websites. In this regard, companies such as Norton Lifelock they work to protect both customers’ devices and their personal information. Microsoft is another company that provides a robust suite of protections with its Microsoft Defender platform, which is an integral part of the Windows operating system.

One simple thing users can do is create strong passwords. Privately held Hive Systems conducted research on password strength and found that while using numbers, upper and lower case letters, and symbols help create better passwords, adding more characters helps more than anything to the strength of the password. For example, an 8-character password with all these types of characters would take about 39 minutes to crack. If you go to 11 characters, you get 34 years. 14 characters? How about 16 million years? Beyond 14 characters it takes billions or even trillions of years to decipher it, depending on how far you want to go.

To conclude

As we said at the beginning, cybersecurity can be a very complicated thing to understand. One way to overcome this complexity, as with any other technology, is to remember that fundamentally the new technology does just what the old technology has always done, just a little differently. If you can understand the basics of what is happening, it will be easier to understand everything.

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