Infosec Pros

How Do Infosec Pros Stay One Ahead?

Cybersecurity is growing more difficult with every passing day. Hackers are becoming more skilled. Attacks like the British Airways hack of August 2018 provides more than enough proof. In this incident, hackers stole the credit card information of about 380,000 people who booked a flight via the British Airways website and app. Since then, many more cybercrimes have taken place, keeping infosec and cybersecurity firms quite busy.

What Even is Cybersecurity?

Cybersecurity involves protecting computer systems, applications, and networks from attacks. Cyberattacks aim at capturing data through various ways, such as scams, fake programs, or applications that take control of your system. People who are especially vulnerable are ones who use many different devices, weak passwords, and programs from which they share all kinds of data. 

For people like these, cybersecurity is a must. Hackers steal information for financial gain, revenge, or entertainment. There are different kinds of cybercrime.

  • Phishing: The use of malicious emails to capture information.
  • Malware: Programs or applications that gain access to information and damage a computer.
  • Ransomware: Software that blocks users’ access to their files or data until the hackers are paid money.
  • Social exploitation: Many advertisements trick people into providing their information to gain access to tempting or appealing websites.

The State of Cybersecurity Today

During a period of nearly a month in the spring of 2019, UNIQLO Japan, a popular fast-fashion retailer, suffered a stuffing attack where about 460,000 fraud-based logins took place. Customer information was stolen, including partial credit card information, excluding CVVs. Yet this attack barely made a blip on the radar. The alarming rate of cyberattacks causes no stir among the public who are more than used to the repeated and notorious data breaches faced by Google, Facebook, and many other companies. Attacks are so common that people barely notice.

How Cybersecurity Experts Stay Ahead

Cybersecurity professionals need to be sharp and well-trained in their field. They know exactly how a hacker thinks. The key to their success relies on certain strategies.

  • Prevention – On days when there aren’t any breaches, infosec pros and cybersecurity experts delve deep into research. Their research helps them understand the reasons for previous attacks, machine language learning, and how threats develop over time. This study is useful to better understand hackers and how they do what they do. And as they say, prevention is better than cure.
  • Threat hunting – Threat hunting is the process of searching for possible threats among applications, programs, or within the system itself. Threat hunting is detailed and in-depth since every little nook and cranny is scanned and inspected for possible threats and then removed. Threat hunting software like Carbon Black’s focuses on intensive research, scanning, and elimination before any further complications can develop.
  • Regular Vulnerability Checks – Experts don’t just act at the time of a threat. They continue to run vulnerability checks every day just to be on the safe side.

There is a Massive Link between Technology and Cybercrime

As technology continues to advance, so do the skills of those behind cybercrimes. It becomes difficult to find and catch hackers because people have so many devices from which they regularly provide access to anyone with some know-how who’s up to no good. Fortunately, cybersecurity is progressing apace and is able to keep up with these crimes. For now.                                                                          



Naveen Kumar
