In the run - up to last fall’s U.S. elections, hackers made headlines after they stole thousands of emails from the inbox of John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
But from a cybersecurity vantage point, this was really old news. Away from the glare of Washington D . C . , attackers have long been busy deploying phishing emails, social engineering , and other schemes to penetrate enterprise security and steal employees’ credentials, such as passwords and user names.
While these types of attacks may fail to generate major headlines, they occur with regularity . Email, in fact, remains a favorite tool used by hackers to attack corporate networks. In an average month, about three-quarters of the more than 21 billion emails transmitted to organizations across the AT&T network are flagged as suspicious and blocked from reaching their destination, according to T he CEO’s Guide to Data Security from AT&T . That is equivalent to more than 400 million spam messages on its network each day .
Flexibility to meet morphing threats
That hints at the new normal around cybersecurity where there’s no rest for the weary. In fact, researchers expect that cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021 , up from $3 trillion just a year ago. Something else to consider: Around 200 billion IoT devices will need to be secur ed by 2020 .
The onus falls to enterprise security experts to devise effective counter strategies that are as innovative as their companies’ business strategies.
Not only are cyberthreats increasingly pervasive but security practitioners must be at the top of their game, matching wits with a cohort of smart, organized cybercriminals who also value innovation as much as do traditional businesses.
Organizations face morphing security challenges that require innovative practices to combat ever-changing threats to data. Many of today’s cyberchallenges did not even exist until only a few years ago. That means the security strategy must be flexible enough to adapt to constant shifts in the threat landscape in what’s essentially an ongoing battle of attrition.
For example, static security perimeters no longer answer current needs. We inhabit a different computing era with data now scattered across mobile laptops, tablets, smartphones, and increasingly, IoT devices and the cloud . Security is a lot more complicated than when