Industrial Automation Magazine India

Companies should not compromise cybersecurity at any cost

Published on : Tuesday 30-11--0001

The flipside of connectivity is the vulnerabilities that come along. How serious is the threat?

Network level vulnerabilities are the most common form of vulnerabilities observed nowadays. A most common attack is the MITM (man-in-the-middle) form of attack. In this form of attack, an attacker can intercept the network requests made by the victim, which means the attacker can track you online and in-fact steal your credentials such as your bank account and social media accounts. 

How can organisations address the issues of cyber attacks and IT Security in the age of connected plants?

Organisations need to take care of cyber infrastructure and protect it from malicious elements. Only way to ensure this is to conduct weekly vulnerability assessments and penetration testing on its servers, web applications, mobile applications, thick client applications, routers and firewalls.

One major threat comes from growing proliferation of IIoT devices and storage (cloud). How can users deal with such threats?

IoT devices and cloud storage infrastructure are being rapidly adopted by big corporations and users. Though they are newer technologies, it is highly insecure and is often vulnerable to wide range of attacks. Users should always protect their resources and prevent public exposure of their resources. It is always recommended to enable web application firewall as well as change the default credentials of the applications.

A leading cybersecurity player recently demonstrated internal vulnerabilities like USB devices. Are employees adequately trained?

It is always recommended to control access of USB devices. An attacker may use a USB device to run a virus, malware or spyware program on the employee’s system. It is recommended to deny USB devices to auto run. Also storage devices should not be allowed to copy data from enterprise systems.

Do companies compromise security by their unwillingness to spend, attributing it to risk appetite?

Companies should not compromise cyber security at any cost. They should have a good budget to protect the cyber resources of the company. A cyber breach to any large corporation costs minimum five million dollars and also leads to loss of brand value.

Is there an ideal solution that reaches a fine balance?

Conduct vulnerability assessment and penetration testing at regular period preferably weekly. Also have a bug bounty program where researchers can submit bugs and get rewarded for the same.

Athul Jayaram is a Consultant at a Big Four consulting organisation. He is a technology driven professional with good knowledge of IT and Security.  His key interests are web application penetration testing, mobile application penetration testing, server penetration testing and network security assessment.  He is also acknowledged by Google, Microsoft, Sony, Intel, Nokia, Lenovo, Oracle, SAP, Yahoo and many other top organizations for finding critical security vulnerabilities.

Athul Jayaram is a Consultant at a Big Four consulting organisation. He is a technology driven professional with good knowledge of IT and Security.  His key interests are web application penetration testing, mobile application penetration testing, server penetration testing and network security assessment.  He is also acknowledged by Google, Microsoft, Sony, Intel, Nokia, Lenovo, Oracle, SAP, Yahoo and many other top organizations for finding critical security vulnerabilities.