Threat Protection
Threat protection refers to the measures taken to safeguard computer systems, networks, and data from various forms of cyberattacks. These attacks can take many forms, such as malware, phishing, ransomware, and viruses, among others. Cyber threats pose significant risks to individuals, businesses, and governments, as they can lead to data theft and financial loss.
Why is Threat Protection Important?
Thus threat protection is important for several reasons:
- Data Protection: Cyber threats can lead to unauthorized access, interception, use, disclosure, or destruction of data. Protecting sensitive data from theft and damage is a primary objective of cyber threat protection
- Helps Building Trust: Businesses, especially those dealing with sensitive data like personal information, financial details, or health records, need to maintain a robust threat protection system. Cyber threat protection helps build trust by ensuring that customer data is safe and secure.
- Preventing Potential Financial Loss: Data breaches can lead to significant financial losses. Cyber threat protection can help prevent these breaches, thereby saving businesses money
- Operational Continuity: Cyber threats can disrupt daily operations, leading to reduced productivity and revenue. Cyber threat protection helps maintain operational continuity, thereby ensuring business continuity.
How does AES-256 bit Encryption really works?
The AES-256 follows several steps :
Block Division: AES-256 uses a 128-bit block size, dividing the plaintext into 4×4 arrays that contain 16 bytes, each byte containing 8 bits. The total bits in every block are 128.
Round Key Generation: The AES-256 uses a key expansion process in which the initial key is used to generate new keys called round keys. The round keys are generated over multiple rounds of modification. Each round makes it harder to break the encryption.
Substitution and Transposition: Each byte of data is substituted with another byte, following a predetermined table. The rows of the 4×4 array are shifted, alternatively. Columns are mixed, combining the four bytes in each column, and the round key is added to the block.
AES-256 encryption is considered extremely secure and virtually uncrackable, even with the most advanced computing power and algorithms.
How often should businesses perform cyber threat protection checks?
Businesses should perform cyber threat protection checks regularly to ensure the security of their data and systems. The frequency of these checks can vary based on the size and type of the business, but generally, it’s recommended to conduct them on a regular basis.
As per the Accenture’s Cost of Cybercrime Study, 66% of businesses have experienced a cyber attack in the past 12 months Given this statistic, it’s clear that cyber threats are a constant concern for businesses. Therefore, performing regular cyber threat protection checks can help businesses identify and address potential vulnerabilities before they can be exploited.
However, the specific frequency can depend on several factors. For example, small to medium-sized businesses might need to perform checks more frequently due to their smaller resources and potentially higher risk profile compared to larger corporations
Regardless of the frequency, it’s important for businesses to implement continuous monitoring and updates to their cybersecurity measures. This includes practices like reducing data transfers, improving password security, updating device software, monitoring for data leaks, and developing a breach response plan.
What are some best practices that we follow for implementing effective cyber threat protection measures?
We have a Robust Cybersecurity Strategy: Our Engineers have developed a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy that addresses all types of data, especially sensitive and proprietary information concerning the health care industry.
We Update and Enforce our Security Policies: We regularly update security policies as new technologies, tools, and data handling methods are adopted. We have employed a zero-trust architecture, which continuously validates every stage of a digital interaction with data.
Installing Security Updates and Backup Data Regularly: We keep our software updated to the latest versions, which usually come with improved security features. Also we ensure that data is regularly backed up and managed effectively.
Control Access to Sensitive Information: We limit the access to sensitive information such as security passwords and highly classified data and only grant access rights to the people necessary.
Continuous IT Training and Education: At ProDash we provide the right training to our employees, and ensure ongoing education/seminars pertaining to cyber security
Developing Strong Data Governance Principles: We establish strategies for data lifecycle management, data privacy compliance, data governance, and data protection. This includes reviewing data at the source and protecting people from unnecessary data access.
Incorporating Zero Trust and Regular SSL Inspection: Zero trust, the idea of “trusting no one and verifying everything,” is a crucial part of our cybersecurity efforts. It involves continuously validating every stage of a digital interaction with data.
ProDash’s Unique Threat Detection and Intrusion Management Mechanism
Our robust cybersecurity intrusion detection system is a multistage model that includes data collection, data preparation, model selection and training, model evaluation, and model usage. In addition, we make use of machine learning techniques which significantly enhances the effectiveness of the system.
Data Collection: Collection and training data consisting of labeled examples, i.e., pairs of matching inputs and outputs. Eg. If building a model to recognize images of patient photo, the data will contain images of patient photo labeled “ patient photo1 “ and different images labeled “not patient photo “ 2.
Data Preparation: The system cleans, normalizes, and transforms the training data to make it suitable for processing by the machine learning model. This includes eliminating missing data, handling categorical characteristics, and normalizing numeric values.
Model Selection and Training: The mechanism selects the appropriate machine learning model for the problem at hand. Then we train the model on the training data, making the model learn the patterns and relationships present in the data. During training, we iteratively adjust the model to minimize the error between its predictions and the corresponding output labels in the training data.
Model Evaluation: We evaluate the model using separate test data, which was not used during the training. This allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of the model in generalizing patterns to new data. We use metrics such as accuracy, precision, and area under the ROC curve to evaluate model performance.
Model Usage: Once the model has been trained and evaluated, it is used to make predictions on new input data. The model applies the relationships learned during training to make predictions about new input instances
How we use Threat Protection in Cloud Computing?
Identity and Access Management (IAM): This is a crucial aspect of AWS security. It involves controlling who has access to your AWS resources. When creating new identities and access policies for your company, grant the minimal set of privileges that everyone needs. Ensure you get the policies approved by your peers and let them reason out why one would need a particular level of access to your AWS account. Temporary access should be provided when absolutely needed
Loose Security Group Policies: Administrators sometimes create loose security group policies that expose loopholes to attackers. To mitigate this issue, all the ports should be closed at the beginning of your account setup. Allow only your IP address to connect to your servers. Creating individual security groups for your instances can also help handle all your instances separately during a threat. This allows you to open or close ports for each machine, without having to depend on other machines’ policies
Continuous Monitoring and Threat Detection: Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub provide continuous visibility, compliance, and detection of threats for AWS accounts and workloads. These tools can be used to detect and remediate threats effectively
Entitlement Management: Microsoft Entra Permissions Management provides comprehensive visibility and control over permissions for any identity and any resource in Azure, AWS, and GCP. It helps in managing the risk associated with the number of unused or excessive permissions across identities and resources
Remember, the key to increasing threat protection in cloud computing is to continuously monitor and update your security measures, ensure proper access control, and use the built-in security features provided by the cloud service providers.