With an ever-increasing number of companies alerting clients that they’ve been hacked, IT professionals, CEO’s, CTO’s and COO’s are now asking themselves one question:
Are hackers getting smarter?
The good news is, the answer is no. Cyber-attackers are not getting smarter. The bad news is, increasingly, businesses and organizations are practicing painfully out of date security measures, which has set the stage for the rise in the number of security breaches.
Most of the compromised data and information suffered by companies and organizations could have been easily avoided with automatic updates and alerts to security personnel.
As a software developer and an IT professional, I’ve had a lot of experiences working with companies that have been neglectful in many ways, including not shifting enough of their resources to their security.
Misadventures can also happen when IT departments or professionals forget to cut employee access months or even years after they’ve left. Or when people use extremely simple passwords for shared accounts.
Insecure practices get implemented in companies and organizations on the daily. In fact, most security mishaps tend to be symptoms of convenience; employees take easier routes or cut corners, which leave companies exposed. Or as noted above, some form of neglect; security controls forgotten or not taken seriously.
Again, all of the above examples can be identified automatically. All security personnel can receive security alerts, and even better, security issues can be addressed and fixed without human intervention.
Looking at compromised companies, a lot of hackers hit big organizations like T-Mobile, Equifax, and hospitals by beating, bypassing or alluding weak, outdated or broken features that are simple to fix, update and secure.
A breach is as simple as a security team and/or IT professional being unaware of vulnerabilities. Or they’re aware of the issues, but are unable to fix them. In most cases, this is how businesses and organizations become exposed.
For example, T-Mobile Australia stored passwords using MD5, a hash standard that has had known security vulnerabilities since 1996. With automated security software, the storage of passwords (and other PII) can be detected by software, which also checks what hash standard is being used in the database.
Equifax had vulnerable software merely because it had not been patched. If they had a tool that could automatically push alerts when a patch comes out that their software has not yet applied, or be proactive enough to automatically install the patch, hacks could easily be avoided.
Another vulnerability noted by the healthcare and medical industry is default password use. This vulnerability was taken advantage of by Mirai malware to compromise hundreds of thousands of devices.
It should go without saying that passwords are a factor that’s incredibly easy to check with automated software. You can think of this brand of security software as benevolent, although it’s capable of simulating popular attacks to determine whether your software is vulnerable or not.
Automation through software enables reports and alerts back to security administrators, allowing them to identify, address and fix issues, if any.
While hackers are getting more and more resourceful, many hacks today are really a result of companies being unaware of breaches or not acting on security vulnerabilities that are easy to detect with automated systems.
With NOVAM, you don’t need to be in the know to prevent compromise.
NOVAM’s machine learning, probabilistic mathematics, proprietary tactics and methods can enable action without prior knowledge of threats.
Proactive, NOVAM is designed to identify, monitor, alert and in some cases initiate an immune system response that automatically mitigates, removes, replaces or quarantines the threat.
NOVAM’s focus: Hardware vendors, software vendors and cybersecurity products.
For artificial intelligence for cybersecurity and adaptive protection
designed to fit your needs visit: https://novam.ai/
