Tag: cyber security
“There are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those that will be.”
– Robert Mueller, FBI Director, 2012.
Individuals and organizations are contributing to the global data boom every single day. And business hyperconnectivity creates new challenges in cyber security. Most organizations are adopting the “better safe than sorry” motto.
What can you do? This article will help you find the answer.
Security – A Very Real Challenge!
Did you know?
The global cyber insurance market is projected to double in size by 2015 to reach nearly 22 billion US dollars!
World data is set to grow to 175 zettabytes (that is, 175 followed by 21 zeros).
Companies worldwide are producing data in large amounts. And with large data comes the risk of higher manipulation. Are companies working on securing their data? Is your company prepared to combat a cyber attack? Cybersecurity is a real challenge! But with technology advancing each day, we now have better means to ensure data security. Let’s find out more about this!
Understanding SAP Security and Compliance
Maintaining a secure IT infrastructure is essential for any organization. SAP security is a means to protect your organization’s data. It monitors and controls access both internally and externally.
54% of organizations acknowledge that their IT departments are not adequately capable of handling advanced cyberattacks.
To protect their data, organizations should ensure that all user access is properly monitored, audit logs are regularly reviewed, and that access controls are regularly updated.
Additionally, organizations should implement a password policy to ensure all passwords are complex and regularly changed. Finally, organizations should confirm security patches are regularly applied to all SAP systems to prevent unauthorized access and potential data breaches. Best practices are key to ensuring your SAP systems remain secure and compliant.
Read more: Top Benefits Businesses Can Gain Form Fingent’s SAP AMS Practices.
Risks Associated with Poor SAP Security and Compliance
Poor security and compliance measures can expose a business to cybersecurity threats and data breaches. Without proper security measures, businesses are vulnerable to malicious attacks, unauthorized access, lawsuits, insurance rate hikes, criminal investigations, and bad press. Furthermore, it may result in heavy fines, reputation damage, and other losses. These are sufficient to put your organization out of business.
Did you know? The cost of data breaches may rise to over $5 trillion in 2024.
Therefore, businesses must understand the risks associated with poor SAP security and compliance and take the necessary steps to protect their systems and data. This includes implementing proper access control measures, monitoring user activities, and ensuring that all security measures are regularly updated and tested.
Common Challenges Faced in SAP Security Compliance
SAP security and compliance are becoming increasingly challenging for organizations of all sizes. As more organizations move to cloud-based SAP solutions, they face the challenge of ensuring consistent security and compliance across all systems.
In addition, as SAP applications continue to become more complex, organizations must ensure they have the right processes and tools to maintain security and compliance. Despite your understanding and diligence concerning safeguarding your SAP databases, chances are you are dealing with the following:
- Manual processes take too much time and are prone to errors, rendering it challenging to cover the entire digital estate.
- You will have to deal with heterogeneous point products that are difficult to manage.
- Third-party services that, in turn, are dependent on either of the aforementioned.
Organizations must have a comprehensive security compliance plan addressing these challenges to ensure their SAP systems are secure and compliant.
Read more: How secure is your business in a multi-cloud environment?
Eliminate Your SAP Cyber Security Blind spots with SAP System Best Practices.
SAP systems are the backbone of many business operations. As a result, ensuring the system is always secure and compliant with corporate policies is essential. To help ensure your SAP system is secure, here are some best practices you can follow:
1. Monitor user activity and implement user access controls
Ensure that all users have the least privileged access to do their job. This limits users’ access and reduces the chances of unauthorized access.
2. Teach the team to take responsibility
Everyone on the team may feel that they are not responsible for the breach. But the fact is that someone must take responsibility for the breach. And this fact must be made clear to all on the team.
3. Keep up to date on the latest enhancement packs
Periodically confirm that all patches and updates are installed regularly. This ensures that any security flaws in the system are addressed as soon as possible.
4. Ensure data is securely stored and encrypted
Develop a strong password policy. Require strong and unique passwords for each user and ensure that passwords are periodically changed. Use multi-factor authentication. This adds an extra layer of security and makes it more difficult for malicious users to access the system. Finally, monitor user activity regularly. This can help identify any suspicious activity or potential threats.
5. Revert to Standard installation
It’s essential to minimize the chances of potential security threats by replacing custom legacy code with updated, patched versions of the programming language standards and SAP applications. To do this, you should eliminate unused code to ensure you don’t accrue any vulnerable technical debt.
6. Identify security gaps
Staying secure requires early detection. Just as regular health checkups help detect issues early and provide a path for effective treatment, conducting frequent assessments of your ERP system can provide full visibility and comprehension of your ERP environment before you make modifications and detect when you may be lagging. Through regular health screenings, any security breaches can be identified.
Following these best practices will help keep the SAP environment secure. It is important to remember that security and compliance is an ongoing process and should be revisited and updated periodically to ensure it is up to date with industry standards.
How Can Fingent Help Attain the Best SAP Security Compliance
Determining which SAP security software is best for your business can be challenging, as it is an important decision. Fortunately, Fingent offers a tailored solution designed to keep critical systems secure. Our security solution also integrates with an organization’s wider cybersecurity monitoring, ensuring the security team is not left in the dark regarding potential threats.
Our experts understand the complexities of managing SAP compliance and are committed to making SAP support and compliance fit your budget and anticipate future needs. We strive to provide comprehensive and cost-effective solutions to all process aspects, including data reporting, administrative tasks, data analysis, and audits. Reach out to our experts and find out how we can help you.
Better businesses need better cyber security.
Regrettably, threats to cyber security have become the new norm across public and private sectors. The pandemic affected all types of businesses. If anything, uncertainties around remote working amplified cybercrime. As a result, cyber security’s importance has become more clear now than ever before.
As cyberattacks become more sophisticated, businesses will have to stay one step ahead. Security professionals need strong support from advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to protect their companies from cyber threats.
AI can enable security teams to handle greater and more complex threats than ever before. More specifically, it has proven to identify and prioritize threats. In some cases, AI has even taken automated action to quickly remediate security issues. This article considers how AI can redefine the cyber security needs of an organization.
Before we discuss further, let’s find out the impact cyberattacks can have on businesses.
How Cyberattacks Affect a Company’s Performance and Value
Protecting a company against cyber threats is costly. It can impact the relationship between your company and your customers.
Unfortunately, cyber threats are never static. Millions are created each year and are becoming more and more potent.
In a survey conducted by Hiscox-Cyber Readiness Report, 28% of the businesses that suffered attacks were targeted on more than five occasions in 2020. Companies have lost millions to such cyber security breaches. Companies like financial services, technology, and energy were hit the hardest.
That is not all. Cyber security breaches have caused several other damages including:
- Outlays such as insurance premiums and public relations support.
- Operational disruption.
- Altered business practices.
- Business’s standing and customer trust.
- Stolen intellectual property including product designs, technologies, and go-to-market strategies.
- Legal consequences.
Read more: Quantum Vs Neuromorphic Computing – What Will the Future of AI Look Like!
How AI Contributes to Cyber Security
Cyber threats are real and certainly worrisome to businesses. It is important to protect critical digital assets.
However, it takes planning and commitment of resources. With good security operations, you can stay on top of most of the most serious cyber threats. True, there may be smart thieves, but Artificial Intelligence can provide smarter security.
Here are 5 specific ways AI can contribute to cyber security:
1. Robust Zero-Day Malware Detection
Malware is unpredictable. And signature-based tools will not detect attacks that have never occurred before. Given that, is it possible to defend against something unpredictable? Yes!
AI is cable of grasping all the possibilities and finding relationships that traditional security tools would miss. While traditional security strategies have their place in cyber security, they are insufficient to detect and prevent zero-day attacks.
Zero-day attacks are best detected by automatically identifying aberrant behavior and alerting administrators immediately. AI can enable organizations to be more proactive and predictive with their security strategies.
Artificial Intelligence provides visibility and security for an organization’s entire data flow. AI helps organizations gain such visibility by dismantling each incoming file to search for any malicious elements. Simultaneously, it also looks at the user and network behavior and anomalies from expected activities.
Together with ML, AI adapts its behavior to new network conditions, constantly adapting to evolving security conditions. Even those hackers who use modern ML penetration methods cannot be fool AI-enabled cyber security.
We cannot stop security breaches from happening. But Artificial Intelligence helps organizations avoid potential disruptions before attackers wreak havoc.
2. AI Can Safeguard Large Amounts of Data
Whether a company is small or mid-sized, there is a lot of data exchanged between customers and the company every day. This information must be safeguarded from potential cyber threats. Cyber security experts cannot always inspect all the data for potential threats.
AI is the best option to detect threats to routine activities. Because of its automated nature, AI can sift through large amounts of data in real-time and identify any hazards lurking amid the chaos.
Read more: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning – The Cyber Security Heroes Of FinTech!
3. AI Takes Care of Redundant Cyber Security Operations
Hackers constantly modify their methods but the fundamental security practices do not change. Plus, they may weary your cyber security worker.
Artificial Intelligence takes care of redundant cyber security operations while imitating the best of human traits. It also does a thorough analysis of the network to locate security flaws that may harm your network.
4. AI can boost response time
Ideal security is the one that can detect security threats in real-time. The principle of ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ applies here.
Integrating AI with cyber security measures is a sure way to detect and respond to attacks immediately. Unlike humans, AI does not miss a spot when examining your system for risks. Besides, it can detect risks early, thereby boosting response time.
5. Authenticity Protection
Most websites allow users to log in and access services or make purchases. You will need greater protection as such a site contains private information and sensitive material. To maintain customer trust, it is important to ensure all data about your guests remains safe while accessing your site.
Artificial Intelligence can provide an enhanced security layer. AI can secure authentication when a user wishes to connect their account. Login measures like CAPTCHA, fingerprint, and facial recognition are used to determine if the attempt is legitimate or not.
Read more: Safeguarding IT Infrastructure from Cyber Attacks – Best Practices
Do Not Be Afraid!
Fingent is your reliable security partner. We provide professional security with reliable service. As a proactive security partner, we look ahead to ensure your business is successful far into the future.
Using AI’s real-time monitoring capabilities, we can spot potential issues before they become a major problem. Security experts Fingent are aware that cyber security threats are not limited to work hours. Our professionals here at Fingent software development experts will be there for your business whenever you need us.
We are in business today because of the reputation we built with our customers. We offer a unique level of enterprise IT support, and our clients can rest easy knowing that their business is always protected.
Give us a call and let’s discuss your security needs.
How AI and Machine Learning are Driving Cyber Security in FinTech?
Being a subset of the financial services domain, FinTech is targeted by hostile cyber villains. Industries thus require secure mechanisms to keep their data safe and secure. Preventing data losses are critical for Fintechs.
The World Economic Forum states that cyber-security is the Number One risk associated with the financial services industry.
Cyber Security Risks Associated With FinTech
Cybersecurity has remained a pressing concern for FinTech. Ever since the global financial crisis of 2008 that challenged the traditional financial institutions significantly, technology-driven start-ups have started evolving increasingly to cater to finance, risk management, digital investments, data security, and so on. Presently, we are in the FinTech 4.0 era.
The major cybersecurity risk that enterprises implementing FinTech face are from integration issues such as data privacy, legacy, compatibility, etc. Hackers target FinTech as they handle large volumes of customer data that include personal, financial, and other critical information.
FinTech offers a multitude of easily accessible services via its APIs. For instance, API banking. Here, the APIs are developed for the banks to access the FinTech platforms. It becomes open, API banking when open APIs enable third-party developers to build banking applications and services.
Let us walk through the major cybersecurity challenges triggered by FinTech.
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Data Integrity Challenge
Mobile applications deployed for FinTech services play a predominant role in cybersecurity assurance. FinTech services require strong encryption algorithms to avoid integrity issues that can arise while transferring financial data.
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Cloud Environment Security Challenge
Cloud computing services such as Payment Gateways, Digital Wallets including other secure online payment solutions are key enablers of the FinTech ecosystem. Though it is simple to make payments via cloud computing, it is equally crucial to maintain the security of data as far as banks are concerned. Appropriate cloud security measures are thus critical while dealing with sensitive information.
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Third-Party Security Challenge
Third-party security challenges include data leakage, service challenges, litigation damages, and so on. Banks should be aware of FinTech service relationships while associating with third-parties.
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Digital Identity Challenges
Major FinTech applications are web apps that have mobile devices working at the front-end. Banks and other financial institutions need to learn about the security architecture of the electronic banking services offered by these applications before implementing the FinTech application.
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Money Laundering Challenges
The use of cryptocurrency for financial transactions makes FinTech-drive banks prone to money laundering activities. Thus, the FinTech ecosystem needs to be formally regulated based on global standards.
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Blockchain Challenges
Private keys can be stolen in case of weak security in blockchain architecture. Cryptographic algorithms need to be strong and transactions need to be confidential.
The increase in the number of FinTech implementation of interfaces will cause a rise in the number of cybersecurity challenges as well.
How Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning Enables Cyber Security For FinTech?
Artificial Intelligence is both reactive as well as proactive or preventative. AI reinvents FinTechs by bringing in behavioral biometrics solutions. These solutions are used to monitor customer and device interactions that take place during transactions that enhance security and authentication. BB or behavioral Biometrics with AI provides problem-solving capabilities for FinTechs. FinTechs utilize Artificial Intelligence is an expert system that enhances decision-making abilities using deductive reasoning. Big Data analytics is used here to focus on quality data.
The underlying technology in using Artificial Intelligence involves reasoning, learning, perception, problem solving, and linguistic intelligence to provide critical insights. It helps in understanding business in real-time operations.
In this digital era of increasing cybersecurity attacks and malpractices, AI can be used effectively to prevent risks and attacks. The following are major ways of how AI and ML protect FinTechs:
1. Fraud Detection
AI and machine learning algorithms are used to detect frauds in FinTechs by being able to identify transactions in real-time accurately. The traditional strategy of fraud detection involved analyzing large volumes of data against sets of defined rules using computers. This process was time-consuming and complex. Unlike this traditional method, more intelligent data analytics tools for fraud detection such as KDD (Knowledge Discovery In Databases), Pattern Recognition, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Statistics, and Data Mining have evolved.
2. Controlling Access
Access control to critical data is crucial when it comes to security. Machine learning is used to derive critical insights from previous behavioral patterns such as geolocation, log-in time, etc to control access to endpoints. The risk scores are fine-tuned by combining supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods to reduce fraud and thwart breach attempts as well.
3. Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are coded in a programming language and stored on the blockchain. With blockchain, new contracts can be added to existing ones without having to change the individual contracts, in case of agreement expansion. Artificial Intelligence has become an integral part of FinTech as more traditional banks are teaming up with FinTechs to leverage the benefits of both worlds. For instance, when customers face issues with a poor credit history while applying for loans.
Artificial Intelligence is yet to be transforming the face of FinTechs in a multitude of ways. Drop-in a call right away and our strategists will guide you on how to leverage the benefits of AI and ML to secure operations and prevent breach attacks.