Information Security is an integral part of our everyday life. We rely on the Internet for banking, online shopping, communicating with friends, or finding out about local news. Information security is essential to organizations and businesses for several reasons. It helps companies prevent fraud, theft, and crime against their customers. It can also stop cyber-attacks from outside sources, affecting their bottom line.
Network security is the group of processes, mechanisms, and controls to protect a computer network. The goal of these measures should be to make it more difficult for an intruder to learn about your network. It is less about what it does for you to prevent unauthorized access or damage to your system.
Importance of Network Security to Organizations And Businesses
Network Security is essential because it protects against threats like unauthorized use of an information system or service disruption. This can be due to several factors, including attacks from outside and inside the network, and even via remote access. The types of attacks can be physical, technical, or social. Some other reasons why network security can be crucial to organizations and businesses are,
Hacking
If another business hacked into a company’s financial information system, it would lose its data. This could lead to them having to close their doors. This is because it would take years before they could recover all the lost information again.
No Proper Protection of Data
Another big reason that information security is essential to organizations and businesses is that if an organization does not have proper protection for their data, it can lead to someone else stealing their ideas and concepts. This is very important because it could put certain companies out of business. Or it could prevent them from ever becoming successful in the first place. Information security is also one of the most rapidly expanding areas today.
Storing of more and more information every day on computers with an increase in technology. People can’t protect all of this information by themselves, so companies are finding ways to make it easier for employees and ensure that their company has top-notch protection against hackers and cyber-attacks from other outside sources, including terrorists, criminals, and domestic threats.
Security Measures To Protect Organizations And Businesses
Security measures should cover at least five areas:
Physical Security: Protecting the machines and their components.
System Security: Controlling user access to data and systems.
Network Security: Preventing an intruder from using your computer network to attack other computer networks.
Application Security: Ensuring that the software applications running on your host computers are robust (have no known vulnerabilities).
Operational Security: How you manage risk, including staffing issues such as training and awareness programs, policies you put in place, incident-response plans, and business continuity plans (the ability to continue critical business processes during a disaster).
Security Policies: Security policies are essential tools that organizations use as part of their overall management strategy. These policies identify responsibilities and expected behaviors by specifying limits on what people may do with the information, computing, communications, and other resources within an organization’s control or responsibility. Also, consider different types of security policies, such as access control policy. An access control policy is a subset of technical security controls that defines how individuals gain access to a resource and what level of access they possess.
Data Storage
We are now living in a world more dependent on computers, communication networks, and data storage than ever before. This is because, first of all, communication networks allow organizations to share information and online access services. We need computers to do daily jobs. This means that if the computer network is compromised, it could seriously affect an organization or business.
Data storage is necessary because it stores and manages information and data for businesses to take advantage of it. It also allows them to share large amounts of data with other companies. It might not hold this data if the network was compromised. This is because it would be too big to transfer from one place to another.
Possible Cyber Attacks On Organizations And Businesses
Denial of Service Attack (DoS)
A few types of attacks that could occur are a Denial of Service Attack, the most common form of attack where an attacker repeatedly sends requests to a server to prevent other users from accessing its services. This usually happens by flooding the computer with traffic and overloading it until it crashes.
Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS)
There is also Distributed Denial of service attack when multiple systems worldwide launch a massive DDoS attack against a target system or website. A man-in-the-middle attack occurs when an intruder intercepts communication between two parties without them knowing about it. This allows the intruder to pretend that they are one of the two people in the conversation and they can now modify, redirect or stop any information discharge.
Result of a Cyber Attack
A successful attack can result in damage to an organization’s reputation, loss of customers, and it could also lead to financial losses. It might also be possible for an attacker to gain access to business-critical information, leading them to take over an organization’s system.
For example, if a computer network were compromised, it would mean that all passwords are at risk because they are stored on this network. If someone managed to compromise it, they would have complete access to everything within the company.
They could take complete control of employees’ email accounts, which means that they will have complete access to private information and be able to send emails pretending to be one of the employees. Employees would also not be able to access their email or internet, meaning they wouldn’t have the ability to communicate with each other, which could affect their company.
If an organization’s network is compromised, it could lead to legal implications, so this is why an organization’s computer network must be secure. If someone compromised it, they could gain complete access to all the networks and computers connected to it. This means that credit card details, business-critical information, etc. couldn’t be kept safe, meaning there are risks in storing data electronically.
Conclusion
The security of a computer network is critical because if it is compromised, the consequences would be severe and have legal implications.
Other types of attacks can take place if an organization or business doesn’t have enough security features added to its computer network. This results in them having complete access to all data on the network. This means that if someone managed to compromise the system they then would have full control over everything within the company.
This means that attackers could monitor employees’ communications, indicating their social life would be at risk. The reason for this is because it is straightforward for attackers to spy on conversations between two people. They can also gain access to personal documents, which they wouldn’t usually have access to. This puts an organization or business at risk. Still, it also puts the reputation of a company under threat. If a computer system gets compromised, their reputation could likely result in loss of sales and serious consequences.
