What is cybersecurity and why is it vital for your company?

What does cybersecurity mean?

The first thing to make clear is that the term cybersecurity does not exist; like many other marketing terms, it is an umbrella term or compendium that encompasses a huge number of scenarios to facilitate the sales process at the expense of putting the end user at risk.

What does your company's digital security really entail?

Just like everyday life, the digital security of your company depends on mitigating various types and levels of vulnerabilities specific to your infrastructure and daily work methodology, which ranges from properly training your IT department and employees, physical access to equipment, digital threats like viruses, malware, adware, etc., direct attacks at the network protocol level, indirect attacks such as phishing and ransomware, incorrect policies for accessing important operational data, inappropriate handling of passwords, to the use of 'cloud' tools without the proper legal understanding of the extent that such a provider has over your company's data on that platform.

But I have never been hacked, so why do I need to focus on security?

This is a very common and damaging situation for companies due to various factors that create a false sense of security, especially because in current culture, audiovisual media for entertainment purposes have created this concept of "hack" completely disconnected from reality where computers magically turn off, hackers leave video announcements of their activities, police entities magically trace "IP" addresses in hours, etc.

Sadly, the reality is completely different. To begin with, a professional hacker will always prioritize being as stealthy as humanly possible, given that in reality extracting information can take an enormous amount of time and effort. Therefore, attracting the attention of the IT staff is the worst-case scenario, and the subsequent detection/tracing process is extremely difficult and usually futile, as attackers are generally highly skilled and never attack in a direct and/or trivial manner.

For this and other reasons, there exists a large section of the global business market affected by security issues ranging from information extraction to the misuse of business resources such as workstations and servers as computing nodes and outlets for illegal activities also known as "botnets."

It is also important to highlight that a sufficiently secure network offers several significant benefits at the business capacity level, and honestly being "hacked" is not the only type of vulnerability that can bring your business to its knees when you least expect it.

What are the most severe and common vulnerabilities that can affect your company?

Ironically, a 'hack' as it is colloquially referred to, direct or personalized attacks are quite uncommon in SMEs since the effort/reward balance is quite low under normal conditions. This does not mean that SMEs do not need appropriate security measures; in fact, it is quite the opposite. The most damaging attacks for an SME are the most common, where SMEs are most vulnerable, such as:

1. Extraction of confidential information / industrial espionage: This case is particularly common and relatively difficult to prevent since it presents multiple effective attack vectors ranging from poor access policies to your data to (ex)employees actively sending information to a third party, even going through a 'cloud' service actively offering access to your data.

2. Ransomware Attacks: These attacks are particularly destructive for a company as the attacker encrypts all its data and deletes the unencrypted version, then demands a ransom normally paid in cryptocurrencies, which generally has more than a 90% chance that the attacker will keep the money and never release the data, or will release the data and simply re-hijack it later if the attack vector used is not effectively detected and corrected.

3. Loss of operational capacity and increase in technical service costs: These are generally attributed to viruses, adware, malware, incorporation into a botnet, and the most common attack vector is lack of training for personnel, unrestricted access to the internet, social networks, adult sites, downloading movies and series, among other non-work-related activities in the use of company resources.

For these reasons and many more, Penta Soft offers its clients Penta Server and Penta Server OS with our fully integrated service and consulting contracts in order to provide a holistic security solution for their company.