What is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity, also known as computer security or IT security is the protection of computer systems and networks from the theft of or damage to their hardware, software, or electronic data as well as from the disruption or misdirection of the services they provide. ‘security concerns’ are the vulnerabilities of the cyber system owing to weakness in design, implementation, operation, or internal control.

The field is gaining more importance due to increased reliance on computer systems, the internet, and wireless network standards such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and due to the growth of smart devices including smartphones, televisions, and the various devices that constitute the “Internet of things”. Owing to its complexity, both in terms of politics and technology, cybersecurity is also one of the major challenges in the contemporary world.

While most aspects of computer security involve digital measures such as electronic passwords and encryption, physical security measures such as metal locks are still used to prevent unauthorized tampering.

Security Concerns:

These concerns or vulnerabilities can be researched, reengineered, hunted, or exploited using automated tools. These are threats which can be categorized into the following categories:

Backdoor; A backdoor is a secret method of bypassing normal authentication or security controls in a computer system, generally in the form of an algorithm or cryptosystem. The reason for their existence can be various including poor configuration or original design. Sometimes, these are added to allow some legitimate access, or by an attacker for malicious reasons. Whatever may be the motive the fact remains that they create a security concern.

Denial-of-service attack; these are designed to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. By entering deliberately a wrong password several consecutive times so that an individual account is locked.

Besides the above, the other concerns are; Direct-access attacks, eavesdropping, multi-vector attacks, phishing, privilege escalation, reverse engineering, social engineering, spoofing, tampering, malware, etc.

Protection Measures:

These are countermeasures or actions, device, procedure, or technique that reduces a threat or security concern. These include security by design(principles of least privilege, automated theorem proving, code reviews/unit testing, defense in depth, audit trails etc.),security architecture(which includes interrelationship & interdependence of different components),security measures(user account access controls/cryptography, firewalls, intrusion detection system etc.),vulnerability management is the cycle of identifying, remediating or mitigating vulnerabilities).These and other countermeasures would address the ‘security concerns’ in an effective manner.