I am bringing out this monthly newsletter, summarizing my key article publications done during July’23. Thanks for the great responses to my articles on Identity and Access Management (IAM) and wider cybersecurity topics. More to come in the coming months.
In simple terms, encrypting viruses are malicious software programs purposefully designed to encrypt files on a victim's system. Once the attackers encrypt the files, they ask for ransom for supplying the decryption key required for decrypting files for the victim to get the access back. In other words, encrypting viruses are nothing but ransomware.
For businesses, it poses a do-or-die scenario. Can these be prevented? The answer is yes:
1. Awareness and security education- This is the best weapon to ensure your employees don’t fall into a hacker’s social engineering trap.
2. Regular patching to ensure your operating system and software is up to date with the latest security patches
3. Have a well thought backup strategy
4. Zero Trust and Micro-segmentation
5. Have well-rehearsed Incident Response ahead of time
It is extremely common for large organizations to have a mix of on-premise Information Technology (IT) set up as well as their IT spread across different cloud vendors. Especially, with Cloud adoption catching up at a rapid pace, a hybrid multi-Cloud environment is quite common today. Hence, the organizations are left with their existing on-premise IT set up along with either evolving Cloud or an already established Cloud set up. How to solve the Identity Access Management (IAM) problem for such setups?
Hence, before getting into solution mode, we need to look at the following key considerations:
- What is your Cybersecurity strategy?
- What is your problem statement?
- Do you already have an Identity Access Management platform?
- Do you need a brand new IAM solution that can handle both on-premise and cloud assets? Or do need an Identity Integration platform to integrate Cloud assets with the existing IAM platform?
- Is your IAM custom built or is that a vendor product:
- What is your Information Technology (IT) landscape?
Machine learning and cybersecurity both are widely discussed topics today. How can machine learning enable cybersecurity? Some of the areas worth looking at are:
- Anomaly Detection
- Malware Detection
- User behavior Analytics
- Threat Intelligence
- Phishing and Spam Detection
- Vulnerability Assessment
Machine learning can be leveraged very effectively as a key enabler for cybersecurity. Today, data is a key asset. Using this key asset machine learning can do wonders protecting our systems.