basics

Data is a critical enterprise asset that underpins operations, drives decision-making, makes personalised end-to-end service delivery possible, unlocks competitive advantage and more. Unfortunately, all this data represents a rich prize for cyber criminals looking to steal, hijack, or hold data to ransom. Which is why cybersecurity has become a top strategic priority for today’s organisations, given the exponential rise of ransomware, phishing and other cyber threats.

If you are a regular reader of Cybersecurity Magazine, you may have come across Security Assurance before. In this article, we take a look at what is behind this abstract term and why it is so important.
Security assurance is an umbrella term for several processes aimed at ensuring individual system components can adequately protect themselves from attacks. Doing so requires not just a one-time effort, but actually spans the complete system lifecycle. After all, what is considered an acceptable security posture may change over time depending on, for example, newly emerging threats or changes to how the system itself is utilized.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks first appeared on the radars of security experts around 1999, when a wave of cyberattacks brought down countless websites, including resources of major corporations, such as CNN, eBay, Amazon, and E-Trade.
Many years later, DDoS attacks have not lost their relevance, on the contrary, DDoS attacks are growing more and more destructive. Financial institutions are increasingly becoming the targets of malicious actors, their financial and commercial losses inflicted by DDoS, lost revenue, customer churn, and hits to reputation, far exceeding operating losses.
DDoS then is a real and pressing threat for banks. But why are DDoS attacks in this industry that much more prevalent?

Since an impenetrable security strategy tends to be a result of combining multiple protective mechanisms, you have to fight on numerous fronts. Let us take a look into these few security practices that are the basis of every cybersecurity scheme.