Tag: Cybersecurity
In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, application security stands as the impervious armor that shields your organization’s digital fortresses. Imagine your organization’s applications as the kingdom’s gates – if left unguarded, they become vulnerable entry points for malevolent forces. We understand that as a CIO, CTO, or IT Manager, you take your duty seriously to ensure these gates are fortified.
In order to assist you in this regard, in this blog, we will delve into the realm of application security and shed light on the importance of each layer of defense. We will also explore how a proactive approach to application security can save your organization from potential disasters.
Why Application Security is a Concern
In an era marked by rapid digital transformation, applications have become the lifeblood of businesses. They manage sensitive data, perform critical functions, and are often the first line of interaction with customers. However, these very assets can be exploited if not adequately secured.
Just as the strength of a fortress determines its ability to withstand attacks, the security of your applications dictates your organization’s resilience against cyber threats. Data breaches, unauthorized access, and system vulnerabilities have become common adversaries in today’s digital age.
Picture this: By 2023, ransomware attacks had hit an astonishing 72% of businesses worldwide, marking a significant rise over the past five years and setting a record high. This emphasizes why application security must be at the forefront of your defense strategy.
The consequences of such breaches are dire, leading to financial losses, reputational damage, and regulatory penalties. According to studies, in 2023, data breaches cost companies worldwide an average of USD 4.45 million, showing a worrying 15% increase in just three years. This statistic underscores the urgency of investing in robust application security measures. So, how can you be prepared?
The Building Blocks of Application Security
The Foundation: Architecture Choices
Every castle begins with a strong foundation, and the same principle applies to application security. The architecture choices you make at the outset are akin to building a formidable fortress. An ill-conceived architectural design can leave cracks in the walls for attackers to exploit.
Just as an architect meticulously plans the layout of a castle, your development team should consider security measures when designing your applications. A single weak link in your architectural chain can lead to disaster. Empirical data reveals that a significant 50% of vulnerabilities stem from poor architectural decisions.
Investing time and resources in designing secure architecture is a proactive approach that can significantly reduce the likelihood of security breaches down the line.
1. Building Strong Walls: Coding Practices and Code Organization
The walls of a fortress serve as the primary defense against intruders. In the world of application security, coding practices and code organization are your virtual walls. Sloppy coding practices create chinks in the armor, allowing malicious code to infiltrate your application.
What can you do?
Imagine coding as the masonry work – each brick (line of code) must be laid meticulously to ensure structural integrity. Security breaches can often result from code vulnerabilities. Ensuring your development team adheres to secure coding practices is akin to reinforcing your fortress walls.
Implementing secure coding practices, conducting regular code reviews, and enforcing coding standards can mitigate vulnerabilities. Training developers in secure coding practices is a crucial step in enhancing your application’s security posture.
2. The Gates and Drawbridges: Library Updates
Just as a castle’s gates and drawbridges are essential entry points, your applications rely on third-party libraries and components. These elements, if left unguarded, can become weak points in your security defenses.
Applications often rely on third-party libraries and components. A concerning fact is that out of about 433,000 websites analyzed, 77% of them use at least one front-end JavaScript library with a known security issue.
Think of libraries as the mechanisms controlling the gates of your fortress. Failing to update them is like leaving the drawbridge down, making it easy for attackers to breach your defenses. Regularly updating these libraries is similar to raising the drawbridge and securing your gates against unwanted visitors.
Additionally, employing automated tools to scan for vulnerabilities in third-party dependencies can help identify and address issues promptly.
3. The Watchful Guards: Application Security Program Management Solutions
Medieval fortresses had vigilant guards patrolling the battlements. Similarly, modern organizations require robust application security program management solutions to keep a watchful eye over their digital assets.
A stark reality: 66% of CIOs are ramping up their investments in cybersecurity. This surge in adoption underscores the growing recognition of the importance of a structured approach to application security.
So, think of these solutions as your digital sentinels, tirelessly scanning for threats and vulnerabilities. These systems serve as your first line of defense, ensuring that potential threats are identified and neutralized promptly.
Read more: A CTO’s Guide To Secured Software Development
How Fingent Helps Fortify Your Digital Kingdom
Without a robust application security strategy in place, your organization is vulnerable to attacks that could have far-reaching consequences.
Just as medieval kings relied on skilled architects, craftsmen, and sentinels to protect their castles, you can depend on Fingent to safeguard your digital kingdom.
At Fingent, we understand the importance of application security, and our expertise in secure architecture design, coding practices, library updates, and application security program management ensures your digital fortresses remain impenetrable. With a deep commitment to security, we offer cutting-edge solutions to protect your digital assets.
In this age of digital warfare, application security is not just an option; it’s your shield against an ever-growing army of cyber threats. Fingent can be your trusted ally in this digital battlefield.
Shifting From Cybersecurity to Cyber Resilience – How Are They Different From Each Other!
Cyberattacks are hitting the headlines with increasing frequency. Data breaches and attacks are currently inevitable parts of running an organization. Cybercriminals are adept at using phishing, malware, or insider threats to infiltrate infrastructure and steal confidential information.
Businesses that compromise their cybersecurity face more than just the loss of confidential data. Cybersecurity breaches can affect a business’s market value, jeopardize the brand reputation and compromise competitiveness. The effects of a single cyber-attack can be permanent and devastating.
How do you combat this era of over-smart cyber criminals? You need more than cyber security. What you need is cyber resilience!
Are you wondering what the best way to protect your company from within and without is? Do you want to secure your business in this volatile economic atmosphere?
If YES is your answer, please continue reading to find out why shifting from cybersecurity to cyber resilience is necessary.
Why Has It Become Necessary to Shift from Cybersecurity to Cyber Resilience
Pandemics are not the only calamities from which a business needs to build resiliency. Any unforeseen event, be it a natural calamity, a shift in the economy, or anything else, needs to be part of comprehensive disaster recovery planning.
Such unforeseen events provide many risk-based opportunities to pivot in response to risk. Chief among these is digital transformation. Here are four risk-based opportunities that make it necessary to shift from cybersecurity to cyber resilience.
1. Strategic risks: Included among many others are business continuity, reputational hazard, competition, insurance legal risks, and more. If these risks are not mitigated in time, they can affect organizational sustainability.
2. Financial risks: Financial risks have implications for regulators, tax complexities, and employee outsourcing.
3. Operational risks: Operational risks include organizational and digital functions, from employee well-being to AI and robotics. It can affect the business process and all those involved.
4. Remote work: This can easily expose an organization to cyber threats.
If an organization becomes a target of persistent cyber threats, its networks will likely be compromised. That is why businesses must be ready.
Cyber resilience allows an organization to minimize the impact of persistent threats. It lowers the probability of a successful attack and minimizes the damage if the attack is successful.
Read more: A Detailed Whitepaper On – Is Cyber Resilience Over Taking Cybersecurity for Good?
How Are They Different From Each Other?
1. Cyber security-the mighty wall
Cyber security is about reacting to a cyber-attack while cyber resilience is about anticipating a possible attack.
Cyber security is about technologies and processes designed to shield computer systems, networks, and data from cyber threats.
For example, when an empire wants to prevent security breaches, it might first build a huge, robust wall. If it feels that is not sufficient, it may construct another wall that is higher than the existing wall and perhaps add a ditch.
Can such measures completely protect an empire from a breach? Well, history has a different story to tell.
Cyber security is somewhat like that wall. It is more focused on preventing hackers from breaching ITs’ security wall. While it may prevent the majority of attacks, a hacker can still find ways to breach that mighty wall when the landscape changes. Despite all measures, an organization may be still vulnerable to a cyber-attack.
Read more: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: The Cyber Security Heroes of FinTech!
2. Cyber resilience-an ever-equipped and ever-prepared tech-ninja
The goal of cyber resilience is to anticipate, withstand, and adapt. It depends on the theory of “when there is a cyber-attack,” not “if there is a cyber-attack.”
A cyber resilient business is like a ninja, able to respond and recover from a cyber-attack. Such a business can continue to operate through the attack, and eventually, get back on track and become more capable of withstanding future disruptions.
It helps organizations to foresee hackers’ activities and be informed about the possible threats they pose. This way organizations are prepared to prevent and protect, defend and respond successfully to any attacks.
Cyber resilience is not just a security measure. It is a cultural shift – a full-time task that applies security best practices to defend an organization’s networks and systems. here are five key areas:
- Prepare: Preparation is key to success! Hence, to prevent cyber-attacks an organization requires a multi-layered approach. This includes technology, people, and processes. Cyber resilience involves having comprehensive security policies and providing training and in-work support to ensure that all involved know their role.
- Protect: In addition to basic security software, more sophisticated solutions like endpoint detection and response solution provide a greater degree of protection. Security awareness training and data protection layers offer even greater cyber resilience levels.
- Durability: Building durability into an organization is one of the end goals of cyber resilience. Adopting a single platform for data and content can make it easier to protect an organization as a breach can be identified quickly and quarantined before it affects other sections. All this while, employees can continue to access other systems and data.
- Recovery: Resilience means rising every time we fall. Cyber resilience means returning to normal no matter what. To avoid a complete halt to all business operations, an effective data backup and recovery is essential. Automated, granular backup and recovery of data to a separate network will enable businesses to quickly restore data that may have been seized or wiped.
- Adapt: According to a writer, adaptability is the simple secret of survival! And that is a key component of cyber resilience. Security solutions that leverage up-to-the-minute threat intelligence ensures that a network can adapt automatically to the latest threats. This sort of intelligence allows you to understand the current threats and make accurate predictions about likely attacks in the future.
Read more: Redefining Cyber Security Needs With AI!
ACT and not REACT
Data and infrastructural security are the topmost concern of every organization. Active and continuous protection is a must for tools and techniques. This is also why investing in cyber resilience can never go wrong in any condition.
Cyber resilience equips businesses with technical know-how in order to prepare for the worst and ensures it can deliver in the worst situations.
Cyber resilience involves a change of mindset. It is also about security operating within the organization and beyond. It is only by thinking of overall network resiliency that businesses can surmount existing threats, and overcome future threats.
Security experts at Fingent have their finger on the pulse of the digital world and know how to nip cyber threats in the bud and keep your business resilient from attacks. This means that you leave your cyber worries in our hands with the confidence that it will be dealt with effectively.
Call us and let’s discuss your security needs and how we can fulfill them.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered to be one of the most significant disruptive technologies today. More and more businesses are already realizing its benefits. Gartner’s 2019 CIO survey revealed that the percentage of companies implementing AI increased by about 270 percent over the last four years, and 37 percent in 2018 alone.
Leveraging the power of AI to enhance your existing business applications isn’t nearly as complicated as you might think. You don’t need a billion-dollar budget to implement AI-powered applications. In fact, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) today are cutting costs and delivering great customer experiences with AI-powered applications—and they are competing with giant companies at scale.
Here’s a look at how you can enhance your existing business applications with AI:
Enhance CRM Apps with AI
Incorporating AI into your current Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, for instance by using chatbot or automated live chat support, will allow your company’s helpdesk to provide better, faster and more dynamic responses. It will also help you reduce the man-hours needed to resolve queries and help you build better engagement and customer trust. And because the AI-powered CRM system provides predictive insights, you can automatically recommend similar products or services a customer may be interested in.
Related Reading: Unconventional Ways Artificial Intelligence Drives Business Value
Streamline Supply Chain with Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) allows your system to discover patterns in the supply chain data using algorithms that automatically identify the factors that contribute to the success of your supply networks, while constantly learning in the process. ML algorithms and the applications running them can analyze large, varied data sets in no time, improving accuracy in forecasting supply and demand. If applied correctly within your SCM work tools, ML could revolutionize the agility and optimization of your supply chain planning.
AI-Powered Recruitment Apps
Artificial Intelligence is expected to replace 16 percent of Human Resource (HR) jobs within the next 10 years, according to Undercover Recruiter. Integrating AI into your existing recruitment processes or tools could help your company’s HR department find the right candidate or the best fit faster and easier, thereby saving you time and money. AI-powered video interview tools, for instance, can utilize biometric and psychometric analysis to evaluate your applicants’ tone of voice, micro-expressions, and body language.
Related Reading: AI To Solve Today’s Retail Profit Problems
Improving Cybersecurity System with AI
Given the data breaches and cyber-attacks that have hit headlines in recent years, integrating AI into your current security system is vital to protect consumer data, improve trust and deliver true business value. About 71 percent of companies in the US plan to spend more budget on AI and machine learning in their cybersecurity software this year.
AI not only improves your company’s existing detection and response capabilities but also allows new abilities in preventive defense. It enhances and streamlines your security operating model by reducing complex, laborious and time-consuming manual inspection and intervention processes. Because the AI-powered cybersecurity system can self-adjust and learn data over time, you can automatically detect and block cyber-attacks and fraud.
Enhancing Space Exploration with AI
Another area where the application of AI has great potential is exploring outer space. NASA has plans to look for life on other planets, such as Mars, in the very near future. In their Mars 2020 initiative, they will use AI to explore Mars in greater depth, which includes looking for alien lifeforms. Most of us are at least slightly familiar with or aware of NASA’s Opportunity rover, which wrapped up a 14-year Mars mission when it quietly went dark in February 2019. Opportunity, also known as “Oppy,” found evidence that Mars at some point was home to water — a huge discovery.
Going forward with Mars 2020, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program will continue its use of AI for space exploration. In ongoing efforts to evaluate whether Mars is (or was at some point) habitable for humans and other animals, the Mars 2020 rover is equipped with a drill it will use to collect samples of rock and soil. It will store these samples in special tubes that will be collected by a later NASA mission. Read more about the artificially-intelligent robotic arm that will make it all happen.
Related Reading: Industry experts weigh in on the adoption of AI and ML in software development
Taking Your Existing Business Applications to the Next Level with AI
New AI frameworks and tools make provisioning AI capabilities more feasible than ever before. Working with a development partner who has the data science and AI technology experience, creating or updating a business application with AI can be started rapidly, take less time to code, and the resulting application placed into service sooner. Nor would it be necessary to staff for these hard-to-find resources for the long term.
Related Video: Artificial Intelligence – How to navigate AI
Cybersecurity statistics reveal that cybercrime is one of the greatest threats to any business. Not accounting for it can result in a loss of crucial and sensitive data and large recovery costs. With increasing attacks on critical infrastructure, stringent security requirements must be in place to protect businesses from threats. Today, hackers have become more formidable thus being informed about cybercrime will prevent a loss of data and profits later down the road.
This infographic will cover the scope of vulnerabilities that could be present in your company and ways to safeguard the IT Infrastructure:
Investing in cybersecurity is essential for protecting your business. Contact us today to plan a cybersecurity strategy especially for your business.