Cybersecurity For Dummies

Joseph Steinberg

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119560340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Cyber Security
• Index: Computer Science

Protect your business and family against cyber attacks

Cybersecurity is the protection against the unauthorized or criminal use of electronic data and the practice of ensuring the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of information. Being "cyber-secure" means that a person or organization has both protected itself against attacks by cyber criminals and other online scoundrels, and ensured that it has the ability to recover if it is attacked.

If keeping your business or your family safe from cybersecurity threats is on your to-do list, Cybersecurity For Dummies will introduce you to the basics of becoming cyber-secure! You'll learn what threats exist, and how to identify, protect against, detect, and respond to these threats, as well as how to recover if you have been breached!

• The who and why of cybersecurity threats
• Basic cybersecurity concepts
• What to do to be cyber-secure
• Cybersecurity careers
• What to think about to stay cybersecure in the future

Now is the time to identify vulnerabilities that may make you a victim of cyber-crime — and to defend yourself before it is too late.

Part 1

Getting Started with Cybersecurity

IN THIS PART …

Discover what cybersecurity is and why defining it is more difficult than you might expect.

Find out why breaches seem to occur so often and why technology alone does not seem to stop them.

Explore various types of common cyberthreats and common cybersecurity tools.

Understand the who, how, and why of various types of attackers and threatening parties that aren’t officially malicious.

Chapter 1

What Exactly Is Cybersecurity?

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding that cybersecurity means different things for different entities

Clarifying the difference between cybersecurity and information security

Showing why cybersecurity is a constantly moving target

Understanding the goals of cybersecurity

Looking at the risks mitigated by cybersecurity

To improve your ability to keep yourself and your loved ones cybersecure, you need to understand what cybersecure means, what your goals should be vis-à-vis cybersecurity, and what exactly you’re securing against.

While the answers to these questions may initially seem simple and straightforward, they aren’t. As you can see in this chapter, these answers can vary dramatically between people, company divisions, organizations, and even within the same entity at different times.

Cybersecurity Means Different Things to Different Folks

While cybersecurity may sound like a simple enough term to define, in actuality, from a practical standpoint, it means quite different things to different people in different situations, leading to extremely varied relevant policies, procedures, and practices. An individual who wants to protect her social media accounts from hacker takeovers, for example, is exceedingly unlikely to assume many of the approaches and technologies used by Pentagon workers to secure classified networks.

Typically, for example:

• For individuals, cybersecurity means that their personal data is not accessible to anyone other than themselves and others whom they have so authorized, and that their computing devices work properly and are free from malware.
• For small business owners, cybersecurity may include ensuring that credit card data is properly protected and that standards for data security are properly implemented at point-of-sale registers.
• For firms conducting online business, cybersecurity may include protecting servers that untrusted outsiders regularly interact with.
• For shared service providers, cybersecurity may entail protecting numerous data centers that house numerous servers that, in turn, host many virtual servers belonging to many different organizations.
• For the government, cybersecurity may include establishing different classifications of data, each with its own set of related laws, policies, procedures, and technologies.

The bottom line is that while the word cybersecurity is easy to define, the practical expectations that enters peoples’ minds when they hear the word vary quite a bit.

Technically speaking, cybersecurity is the subset of information security that addresses information and information systems that store and process data in electronic form, whereas information security encompasses the security of all forms of data (for example, securing a paper file and a filing cabinet).

That said, today, many people colloquially interchange the terms, often referring to aspects of information security that are technically not part of cybersecurity as being part of the latter. Such usage also results from the blending of the two in many situations. Technically speaking, for example, if someone writes down a password on a piece of paper and leaves the paper on his desk where other people can see the password instead of placing the paper in a safe deposit box or safe, he has violated a principle of information security, not of cybersecurity, even though his actions may result in serious cybersecurity repercussions.

Cybersecurity Is a Constantly Moving Target

While the ultimate goal of cybersecurity may not change much over time, the policies, procedures, and technologies used to achieve it change dramatically as the years march on. Many approaches and technologies that were more than adequate to protect consumers’ digital data in 1980, for example, are effectively worthless today, either because they’re no longer practical to employ or because technological advances have rendered them obsolete or impotent.

While assembling a complete list of every advancement that the world has seen in recent decades and how such changes impact cybersecurity in effectively impossible, we can examine several key development area and their impacts on the ever-evolving nature of cybersecurity: technological changes, economic model shifts, and outsourcing.

Technological changes

Technological changes tremendously impact cybersecurity. New risks come along with the new capabilities and conveniences that new offerings deliver. As the pact of technological advancement continues to increase, therefore, so does the pace of new cybersecurity risks. While the number of such risks created over the past few decades as the result of new offerings is astounding, the areas described in the following sections have yielded a disproportionate impact on cybersecurity.

Digital data

The last few decades have witnessed dramatic changes in the technologies that exist, as well as vis-à-vis who use such technologies, how they do so, and for what purposes. All these factors impact cybersecurity.

Consider, for example, that when many of the people alive today were children, controlling access to data in a business environment simply meant that the data owner placed a physical file containing the information into a locked cabinet and gave the key to only people he recognized as being authorized personnel and only when they requested the key during business hours. For additional security, he may have located the cabinet in an office that was locked after business hours and which itself was in a building that was also locked and alarmed.

Today, with the digital storage of information, however, simple filing and protection schemes have been replaced with complex technologies that must automatically authenticate users who seek the data from potentially any location at potentially any time, determine whether the users are authorized to access a particular element or set of data, and securely deliver the proper data — all while preventing any attacks against the system servicing data requests, any attacks against the data in transit, and any of the security controls protecting the both of them.

Furthermore, the transition from written communication to email and chat has moved tremendous amounts of sensitive information to Internet-connected servers. Likewise, society’s move from film to digital photography and videography has increased the stakes for cybersecurity. Nearly every photograph and video taken today is stored electronically rather than on film and negatives — a situation that has enabled criminals situated anywhere to either steal people’s images and leak them, or to hold people’s valuable images ransom with ransomware. The fact that movies and television shows are now stored and transmitted electronically has likewise allowed pirates to copy them and offer them to the masses — sometimes via malware-infested websites.

The Internet

The most significant technological advancement when it comes to cybersecurity impact has been the arrival of the Internet era. Just a few decades ago, it was unfathomable that hackers from across the globe could disrupt a business, manipulate an election, or steal a billion dollars. Today, no knowledgeable person would dismiss any such possibilities.

Prior to the Internet era, it was extremely difficult for the average hacker to financially profit by hacking. The arrival of online banking and commerce in the 1990s, however, meant that hackers could directly steal money or goods and services — which meant that not only could hackers quickly and easily monetize their efforts, but unethical people had strong incentives to enter the world of cybercrime.

Cryptocurrency

Compounding those incentives severalfold has been the arrival and proliferation of cryptocurrency over the past decade, along with innovation that has dramatically magnified the potential return-on-investment for criminals involved in cybercrime, simultaneously increasing their ability to earn money through cybercrime and improving their ability to hide while doing so. Criminals historically faced a challenge when receiving payments since the account from which they ultimately withdrew the money could often be tied to them. Cryptocurrency effectively eliminated such risks.

Mobile workforces and ubiquitous access

Not that many years ago, in the pre-Internet era, it was impossible for hackers to access corporate systems remotely because corporate networks were not connected to any public networks, and often had no dial-in capabilities. Executives on the road would often call their assistants to check messages and obtain necessary data while they were remote.

Connectivity to the Internet created some risk, but initially firewalls did not allow people outside the organization to initiate communications — so, short of firewall misconfigurations and/or bugs, most internal systems remained relatively isolated. The dawn of e-commerce and e-banking, of course, meant that certain production systems had to be reachable and addressable from the outside world, but employee networks, for example, usually remained generally isolated.

The arrival of remote access technologies — starting with services like Outlook Web Access and pcAnywhere, and evolving to full VPN and VPN-like access — has totally changed the game.

Smart devices

Likewise, the arrival of smart devices and the Internet of Things (the universe of devices that are not traditional computers, but that are connected to the Internet) — whose proliferation and expansion are presently occurring at a startling rate — means that unhackable solid-state machines are being quickly replaced with devices that can potentially be controlled by hackers halfway around the world. T...