Cyber Security - What is cyber security?

Have you ever thought about how many reasons there are for us to activate protection for our devices connected to the internet? And how urgent the need has become for such technologies that allow us to access the internet safely? In this article, we will discuss the most important modern areas that are rapidly evolving to provide us with effective protection in performing our tasks online or browsing securely, and how this field contributes to protecting our online privacy and preventing unauthorized individuals from accessing that information. Get a paper, pen, and follow along with me through this article.

Cyber attacks represent serious operations on our information, as they are attacks carried out on specific victims, whether individuals or institutions and organizations. Through these attacks, sensitive information belonging to the targeted person is accessed with the aim of theft, extortion, data destruction, and exposing the person or organization to financial or moral losses, depending on the objectives of the attacker, which vary from one person to another.

Unlike cyber attacks, cybersecurity is the process of protecting electronic systems, networks, computers, and various programs from these attacks executed according to the motivations leading to them. It enables high-efficiency protection to prevent the access of entities attempting to breach systems to access private and sensitive data, which may include assets, funds, governmental personal data, and so forth.

The levels of protection may vary from one program to another or from one organization to another. Protection comes in different levels and layers; for instance, the protection possessed by banks is not like that of commercial enterprises. Or the protection on famous social media sites like Facebook and Instagram is not like that of less famous social media platforms. It depends on several factors to obtain the required protection, such as the available financial budget, or the required level of protection deemed sufficient for a specific system or institution, and other factors that determine that.

We can divide the importance of this field into three different sections, targeting specific categories or parts of the required protection levels according to the goal of providing protection. Here are three sections for which protection must be provided:

-Ransomware: Software downloaded to the victim's device that steals user or organization data or shuts down work on the device in exchange for paying a monetary amount to the programmer of that malicious software in exchange for reopening the system or device or restoring the data that was stolen through it. Again, the likelihood is high that the system will not be reopened or the data restored.

-Malware: A set of software that causes damage to devices or slows down their performance, such as Trojans or viruses that will cause malfunctions in the device and prevent task performance, or spyware through keyboard clicks or sound.

-Phishing: A method that uses social engineering to obtain data from the victim through the victim himself or the user who is communicated with by gaining trust and emotion from him.

-DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) Attack: Sending numerous fake requests to the server that will disrupt its performance or cause delays in operations on it, leading to preventing communication with the server.

- Information and Data Security: This involves protecting data in all situations, whether during data transfer, reception, or when it is idle and not currently in use. Precautionary measures are taken, such as data backup in case of loss, providing high levels of protection such as encryption and data auditing, and subjecting it to scanning processes in case there is a possibility of losing some of that data during transmission or access.

- Cloud Security: This also provides cloud storage for data, allowing data to be stored in the cloud and shared within permissions set by the data owner. Now and in the future, it is one of the optimal methods used by organizations to store and protect data and create secure backups.

- Software Security: The software we work on must also be secured from various systems, whether for work purposes or even games. We should download them from reliable and secure sources, and we should continue to provide them with new updates that contribute to improving their efficiency.

- Network Security: Servers and connected devices that form a computer network, regardless of their type, are the most important point in security operations. Sometimes, protecting the server that owns and stores data may be sufficient and save us from paying additional amounts for protecting our private and sensitive data. However, it should be noted that it is important to provide protection in the best possible ways and not just rely on protecting the server alone, but also protect devices and software as much as possible because even attacks evolve.