Why cyber security is important for technology businesses? | Blog 13

Cyber security is important to technology businesses since they provide products and services that have applications across multiple industries; a single vulnerability of products or services would result in a huge catastrophe which would affect the reputation adversely.

Since the world has transformed into the so-called data-driven world, data breaches can affect hundreds of millions or even billions of people at a time. As attackers exploit the data dependencies of everyday life, digital transformation has expanded the quantity of moving data, and data breaches have grown up with it.

And, since individuals are adapting more into a state of “Cyber Aware citizens,” a single data leak may wreak havoc on a firm’s reputation, wiping out all of the effort and time the organization has invested within the service. Setting up off-the-shelf solutions such as antivirus and firewalls is no longer effective since cybercriminals evolve in tandem with time. Breach incidents at Yahoo (2013, 2014), Alibaba (2019), Facebook (2019), and LinkedIn (2021), among others, could be classified as the most severe examples of such events in which customers began to lose trust in their most valued companies.

There exists a common misperception that multi-million-dollar corporations are the main targets of cybercriminals. According to recent statistics by CyberSecurity Magazine, 43 percent of data breaches targeted small and medium-sized enterprises which were due to a lack of preventive and combative measures. It might be due to the belief that the most updated version of software and security is much expensive to implement, which leaves them susceptible. In fact, the loss incurred by these cyber incidents was significantly greater than the cost of implementing those updated versions.

Considering the scenario in which big-tech companies with comprehensive security measures rely on comparatively smaller-tech companies for developing new software packages for their services, in which the so-called “cyber hygiene” is not taken into account, which would result in the same catastrophic event as the parent companies with poor security measures.

Competing companies that provide comparable services could also take advantage at the moment of the company’s panic caused by the cyber incident. This could result in a significant loss because customers tend to seek out better service providers when trust concerns arise. The rise of Google in comparison to the decline of Yahoo is a prime illustration of such a scenario.

Unfortunately, the dirty little secret is that majority of cyberattacks happen due to poor cyber hygiene. Having legacy security architecture that is good on paper but doesn’t prevent attacks, porous access control, and poor implementation of security controls will result in a broad attack surface that no new shiny tool will solve. Focusing first on the basic blocking and tackling like patch management, access control, service account rotation, certificate management, network segmentation, and others — while “uncool” — is a must.

In basic terms, the quote “prevention is always better than cure” is a concept that must be utilized in every part of technology in an attempt to grant near-perfect services to the most valuable asset, aka customers.