Big Data and Cyber Security Brings Newer Challenges for WFH

1.3 Billion People in India stayed at home to save them and save the country. Now a question arises on how to prepare for the Post Covid19 Era.

Current trends-including the digitization of enterprise as well as new threat methodologies-are increasing enterprises' attack surface exponentially. The worldwide spending on information security and risk management systems to reach $131B in 2020, and expected to touch $174B in 2022 approximately $50B will be dedicated to protecting the endpoint.

Now this data is going to very, reason being there are fast digitisation had adopted in many organisations ,because of most of employees has to work remotely. Now, the issue is , the growth of big data and cyber security is going to me another critical issue.

There is both opportunity and risk for most businesses. If you are in the cyber security field you are likely very familiar with big data, which is the term used to describe a very large data set that is mined and analyzed to find patterns and behavioral trends.

From a cyber security standpoint big data has ushered in new possibilities in terms of analytics and security solutions to protect data and prevent future cyber-attacks. But just as big data has opened up new possibilities for cyber security teams, it has also given cyber criminals the opportunity to access mass quantities of sensitive and personal information by using advanced technologies.

Challenges For Businesses Running With Bigdata:

Protecting sensitive and personal information

Data rights and ownership

Not having the talent (i.e. data scientists) to analyze the data

Increasing Big Data Security

When cyber criminals target big data sets, the reward is often well worth the effort needed to penetrate security layers, which is why big data presents such a great opportunity not only for businesses but for cyber criminals. They have a lot more to gain when they go after such a large data set. Consequently, companies have a lot more to lose should they face a cyber-attack, without the proper security measures in place.

The role of digital connectivity in our lives has grown over recent years, but never have we been so acutely aware of how critically we depend on it. COVID-19 brings opportunity for the organisations into Technology, connectivity and Security ,we have seen there is great spike by increased demand for internet connectivity. The demand for data and connectivity is putting greater demand on traditional network architecture.

COVID-19 has forced the firms to embrace remote working. Even the Data centers are also expanding from cloud to network edge and adopting various applications for better performance of AI for the driving data center technology . Our survey says, the Edge Data centers are on the Rise. The year 2020 looks to be a game-changing year for edge infrastructure.

As per our report, Google says it has blocked 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19 over the past week. The search giant also says, it has encountered over 240 million daily spam messages related to the novel coronavirus. On a typical day, Google blocks over 100 million phishing messages daily. According to Google, the cybercriminals use both fear and financial incentives to create urgency to prompt users to respond and the Human Firewall anti-phishing lab has seen a rise of over 700%, i.e 7X increase in phishing attacks in April 2020.

In March, cybercriminals distributed phishing emails appearing to originate from organizations offering COVID-19 testing. Users were prompted to open an attached document, which would then download the information stealing Trickbot malware.

April also saw cybercriminals use phishing emails to promote a fake website featuring a global Coronavirus infection map appearing to provide data from John Hopkins CSSE. Unfortunately, those same emails were used to infect inquisitive users with a strain of information stealing Azorult malware.

Mid-April also saw cybercriminals use COVID-19-themed emails from a bogus insurance company to infect users’ systems with fake invoice attachments carrying the Hancitor malware.

April saw the emergence of phishing email campaigns using subject lines such as “COVID-19 Urgent Precaution Measures” to distribute the NanoCore Remote Access Tool (RAT) for exfiltration of valuable information.

In a recent report, phishing scams and malicious COVID-19 links have grown from 15 in January 2020 to 54,772 in March. If you ever receive an email around PPE’s, masks, hand sanitizers etc, think twice before clicking on the link. There is an increasing number of cases where employees receive such emails, which once clicked on provide an inroad to hackers with malicious intent.

The whole world is now adapting to the 'new normal' amid a pandemic. Time has also come for organisations to navigate towards growth by mitigating business and operational challenges.

During this Pandemic, several industries have realized the drawbacks of being excessively dependent on manufacturing in a single country and are looking to expand the geographic spread of their facilities. India is fast emerging as World's Manufacturing Hub.

It is certainly a tough time for all of us and we don't see normal situation before vaccine is developed, which is expected by end of 2020. Unfortunately, we will miss our unparalleled networking Conventions / Tech Forums for few more months. Physical Distancing is the only answer to win war against Covid19.

One must secure your home networks. Even if you have a separate work laptop provided by your office, while working from home, you’d be using your home Wi-Fi. And your organisation’s IT team has no control over it what so ever.

In case the IT team of your organization fails to install a VPN client, you can always secure the Wi-Fi network or individual devices, as you prefer, by subscribing for a paid VPN service. Reason, Free VPN’s as they are not safe and usually compromise security and VPNs are accessed through unmanaged devices. When we have done a deep drive, came to know 60% of enterprises will phase out most of their remote access virtual private networks( VPSs) in favour of zero trust by 2023.