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October - 2016 issue

Cloud and IOT Demand a Higher level of Cyber Security

By Vignesh Anantharaj

The level at which online entities can come closer to our private and professional lives have been exposed to be far greater than what anybody could have ever expected. The number of data endpoints to shore up has increased drastically as cyber criminals constantly change to swifter and more invisible methods.

Another aspect that drives a majority of security trends in India is application security. Data resides behind the application and attackers have understood that in today’s world, data equates to money! Hence the target is towards the same. Incidentally threat intelligence is also gaining traction with organizations expanding threat intelligence capabilities drastically. These capabilities are varied by providers, but mostly involve monitoring the Internet for indicators that a particular company, its products, services, websites or personnel are being targeted.

Although it is hard to predict where the next attack might come from, it is a dark prospect to imagine malware that takes hostage of not just local documents, but a range of cloud-hosted data.

Data encryption is not exactly a necessity in this scenario as it can even take the form of blackmails wherein a hacker threatens to make confidential data public. Strong password and cloud data access policies are more important than ever. Hence, security is only as good as the weakest point in the network; in many cases it has been proven to be the windows endpoint and user awareness.
Apart from all of these we cannot rule out cyber espionage with state and big corporations that try to steal sensitive information of adversaries’ thorough stealth and sophisticated cyber attacks and malware. To counter all of these India needs to develop offensive and defensive cyber security capabilities to tackle these Cyber security breaches.

Through this month’s feature of “20 most promising Cyber Security companies” we cover organizations that delve deep into the network security issues of today and try to keep ahead of current cyber attackers through their innovative solutions and working methodologies. In the cover story feature we highlight the story of how Qualys Solutions helps organizations to secure intelligence, automate auditing, provide compliance and protection for IT systems in a unique and appreciable manner.