What is Cyber Security and How Does it Work

Computer Hackers - What is Cyber Security and How Does it Work

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Cyber security can be described as the collective methods, technologies, and processes to help protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of computer systems, networks and data, against cyber-attacks or unauthorized access.

The main purpose of cyber security is to protect all organizational assets from both external and internal threats as well as disruptions caused due to natural disasters.

As organizational assets are made up of multiple disparate systems, an effective and efficient cyber security posture requires coordinated efforts across all its information systems. Therefore, cyber security is made up of the following sub-domains:

Application Security
Application security involves implementing various defenses within all software and services used within an organization against a wide range of threats. It requires designing secure application architectures, writing secure code, implementing strong data input validation, threat modeling, etc. to minimize the likelihood of any unauthorized access or modification of application resources.

Identity Management and Data Security
Identity management includes frameworks, processes, and activities that enables authentication and authorization of legitimate individuals to information systems within an organization. Data security involves implementing strong information storage mechanisms that ensure security of data at rest and in transit.

Network Security
Network security involves implementing both hardware and software mechanisms to protect the network and infrastructure from unauthorized access, disruptions, and misuse. Effective network security helps protect organizational assets against multiple external and internal threats.

Mobile Security
Mobile security refers to protecting both organizational and personal information stored on mobile devices like cell phones, laptops, tablets, etc. from various threats such as unauthorized access, device loss or theft, malware, etc.

Cloud Security
Cloud security relates to designing secure cloud architectures and applications for organization using various cloud service providers such as AWS, Google, Azure, Rackspace, etc. Effective architecture and environment configuration ensures protection against various threats.

Disaster recovery and business continuity planning (DR&BC)
DR&BC deals with processes, monitoring, alerts and plans that help organizations prepare for keeping business critical systems online during and after any kind of a disaster as well as resuming lost operations and systems after an incident.

User education
Formally training individuals regarding topics on computer security is essential in raising awareness about industry best practices, organizational procedures and policies as well as monitoring and reporting malicious activities.