2016 has been a roller coaster ride in the cyber security space. With cyber breach news on Debit Cards, Yahoo Hack, IRCTC Hack and the very recent hack of Social Media account of known personalities, the security of personal data is questionable.
Social media accounts have been hacked for a variety of reasons, most common of them all happens to be for fun. However, major part of hacking is not technical skills or computers, but the skill of tricking human beings. These hackers mostly prey on the altruistic impulses, greed and gullibility of people.
Post demonetization, while the use of online payment platforms have gone up, along with it has grown the fraudulent misuse of payment networks and data theft. In the given scenario, the foremost of all threats is identity. Considering the recent breach incidences with 3.2 million Debit Cards compromised, it is important to know every customer, partners, their customers and most importantly your own employees. Therefore, unless one understands and owns the game of identity, companies will continue facing growth constrains caused because of frauds and attacks, resulting in lack of confidence. Furthermore, the security provisions and applications still remain the same. While people are getting comfortable with mobile wallets and banking through apps and smartphones, Wi-Fi networks continue to have major security flaws that can make it very dangerous to conduct transactions using mobile device. Though there are several rules on do's and don'ts of using a Wi-Fi, one should always keep in mind not to use public Wi-Fi to access financial info.
On the other hand organizations are also required to adopt and setup multiple defence mechanism. One should also Keep operating system and browser up-to-date with the latest protective patches installed only from trusted websites. Most operating systems regularly release updates that fix security vulnerabilities, and not updating them may leave security holes and glitches that can be exploited in a hacking attempt.
As far as expectations is concerned, Hackers will Continue to Exploit the Weakest Link. Until organizations persistently protect information at the data level , these attacks won’t slow down. And, as companies increasingly utilize third party service providers to reduce costs, more and more information will be at risk. In 2017, we can also expect to see organizations placing stricter compliance regulations on their third-party outsource vendors and other external collaboration partners. Cybersecurity and Cloud migration continues to be a major emphasis, with CIOs renting more software through the internet and investing in more proactive approaches for defending their corporate castles.In 2016 we saw organizations across many industries recognizing the potential of cyber-security to enable their move to become digital businesses. We will see this trend continuing in 2017. So security needs to be pushed beyond the physical perimeter into a cloud environment.
