5Ps : The most common causes for breaches

Venkat Krishnapur
Vice President of Engineering and Managing Director, McAfee India

“With remote working and BYOD now being the new normal, cybercriminals are increasingly looking to capitalize on the widespread panic, by targeting gullible employees with surreal offers, cures, vaccine updates and fake news. A large number of people using their personal devices also pose increased risks, since often these devices don’t have proper endpoint security solutions, potentially leaving organisations open to both malicious attacks on their devices as well as loss of crucial corporate information. Malicious actors also leverage spear-phishing, and target select employees to gain access to critical data like staff credentials, intellectual property and customer data.

Businesses as well as employees need to remember the 5Ps that are usually the most common causes for breaches - Phishing, Passwords, People, Patching and Privileges. These are all the more important when it comes to securing corporate data in a highly remote working environment.

Organisations must implement measures to protect their devices and data by establishing remote working policies, list the right tools and platforms, increase the levels of monitoring and audit, and enforce a Zero Trust architecture to mitigate threats. By putting in place anti-malware solutions, which employ cloud-based behavior analysis, and threat intelligence combined with cloud-based web security, organisations can help ensure nearly equal level of security - both on and off the network.

On the home front, it is critical to establish a secure remote connection. This would require the use of a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to ensure data flow is encrypted and controlled within a secure corporate network and by configuration and remote management of devices by enforcing the appropriate security policies. It is strongly advised that employees regularly change cloud passwords with multi-factor authentication to confirm their identity. Having DLP (Data Leakage Prevention) on the devices and configuring appropriate cloud policies – both private and public, would further ensure that the scope for data leakage is minimized. Taking this a step further, organizations must add an additional layer of security of authentication to access company data on mobile devices.

The ever-increasing number of attacks intensified by speed and complexity can overpower experienced and efficient human security professionals. In response to this unanticipated challenge, AI based tools for cybersecurity have emerged to be instrumental in helping security teams reduce risk and efficiently improve their security posture.

By applying advanced analytics and AI to vast amounts of internal and external data, security teams can generate predictive, usable insights that help businesses make better cyber decisions and protect organizations from threats. These actionable insights also help detect and respond to threats faster by monitoring the external environment with a level of speed and accuracy only machines can deliver. “