Cybersecurity 101 — A Beginner’s Guide to Cybersecurity World

Aryya Paul
Edureka
Published in
5 min readJun 20, 2018
What is Cybersecurity — Edureka

Cybercrime is a global problem that’s been dominating the news cycle. It poses a threat to individual security and an even bigger threat to large international companies, banks, and governments. Today’s organized cybercrimes far out shadow lone hackers of the past now large organized crime rings function like start-ups and often employ highly-trained developers who are constantly innovating online attacks. With so much data to exploit out there, Cybersecurity has become essential. Hence, I decided to write up this article on “What is Cybersecurity?”

Before we begin, let me just list out the topics I’ll be covering through the course of this blog.

  • Why we need Cybersecurity?
  • Types of Cyber Attacks
  • What is Cybersecurity?
  • The CIA Triad
  • How is Cybersecurity implemented?

Why we need Cybersecurity?

The golden age of Hackers — What is Cybersecurity?

It can be rightfully said that today’s generation lives on the internet, and we general users are almost ignorant as to how those random bits of 1’s and 0’s reach securely to our computer. For a hacker, it’s a golden age. With so many access points, public IP’s and constant traffic and tons of data to exploit, black hat hackers are having one hell of time exploiting vulnerabilities and creating malicious software for the same. Above that, cyber attacks are evolving by the day. Hackers are becoming smarter and more creative with their malware and how they bypass virus scans and firewalls still baffles many people.

Therefore there has to be some sort of protocol that protects us against all these cyber attacks and make sure our data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. This is exactly why we need cybersecurity.

Let’s see some of the most common cyber attacks that have plagued us as a community since the beginning of the internet.

Types of Cyber Attacks

Types of Cyberthreats — What is Cybersecurity?

What is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity refers to a set of techniques used to protect the integrity of networks, programs and data from attack, damage or unauthorized access.

From a computing point of view, security comprises cybersecurity and physical security — both are used by enterprises to protect against unauthorized access to data centers and other computerized systems. Information security, which is designed to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data, is a subset of cybersecurity. The use of cyber security can help prevent cyber attacks, data breaches, and identity theft and can aid in risk management.

So when talking about cybersecurity, one might wonder “What are we trying to protect ourselves against?” Well, there are three main aspects we are trying to control, name:

  • Unauthorized Access
  • Unauthorized Deletion
  • Unauthorized Modification

These three terms are synonymous with the very commonly known CIA triad which stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. The CIA triad is also commonly referred to as the three pillars of security and most of the security policies of an organization are built on these three principles.

The CIA Triad

The CIA triad which stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability is a design model to guide companies and organizations to form their security policies. It is also known as the AIC triad to avoid confusion with the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA). The components of the triad are considered to be the most important and fundamental components of security. So let me brief you all about the three components

CIA Triad — What is Cybersecurity?

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is the protection of personal information. Confidentiality means keeping a client’s information between you and the client, and not telling others including co-workers, friends, family, etc.

Integrity

Integrity, in the context of computer systems, refers to methods of ensuring that data is real, accurate and safeguarded from unauthorized user modification.

Availability

Availability, in the context of a computer system, refers to the ability of a user to access information or resources in a specified location and in the correct format.

Attacks on CIA — What is Cybersecurity?

How is Cybersecurity implemented?

There are numerous procedures for actually implementing cybersecurity, but there three main steps when actually fixing a security-related issue.

The first step is to recognize the problem that is causing the security issue, for example, we have to recognize whether there is a denial of service attack or a man in the middle attack. The next step is to evaluate and analyze the problem. We have to make sure we isolate all the data and information that may have been compromised in the attack. Finally, after evaluating and analyzing the problem, the last step is to develop a patch that actually solves the problem and brings back the organization to a running state.

Steps to treat a Cyberattack — What is Cybersecurity?

When identifying, analyzing and treating a cyber attack, there are three principals that are kept in mind for various calculations. They are:

Vulnerability, Threat and Risk — What is Cybersecurity?

If you wish to check out more articles on the market’s most trending technologies like Artificial Intelligence, DevOps, Ethical Hacking, then you can refer to Edureka’s official site.

Do look out for other articles in this series which will explain the various other aspects of Cybersecurity.

1. What is Cryptography?

2. Cybersecurity Framework

3. Steganography Tutorial

4. What is Network Security?

5. What is Computer Security?

6. What is Application Security?

7. Penetration Testing

8. Ethical Hacking Tutorial

9. Everything You Need To Know About Kali Linux

10. Ethical Hacking using Python

11. DDOS attack

12. MacChanger with Python

13 ARP Spoofing

14. Proxychains, Anonsurf & MacChange

15. Footprinting

16. Top 50 Cybersecurity Interview Questions and Answers

Originally published at www.edureka.co on June 20, 2018.

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