Yes, you read that right. Cyber criminals are not just after your personal or corporate data of the companies but something much bigger. No doubt, personal or corporate data including health, financial data has many takers on the market of if not, the companies can be kept hostage for ransom. For some companies, however there are bigger concerns- that is, the theft relating to Intellectual Property.
Although there isn’t much incidence of such thefts reported but it is because companies want to be keep it that way until it is material event related to a public company occurs. Keeping it under the wraps maintains the secrecy the company initial set to do.
Corporate espionage is widespread and companies fall prey to it, every day! There is a growing business based on copied/stolen ideas- ranging from defense to software’s to drug manufacturing to communication equipment. Most of the thefts come from cyber criminals while most companies are in adverse conditions in keeping the guard’s high against the cyber theft. This is mainly because the companies still rely on traditional security measures such as- firewalls, intrusion prevention systems and sandboxing.
Though, the preventive security measures are important but it will not save the day. Vulnerabilities tend to exist by the very nature of architecture and when cyber criminals get hold of it, they exploit it. An active attack is hard to detect. Cyber criminals can lay low inside a company’s network for weeks before they plan and execute a full-scale attack.
Measures in the area of active threat detection are necessary. Technologies such as- Behavioral Attack Detection systems are promising. Finding the attacker in the system before they can cause any damage is very crucial. One way to do that is not to let the intrusion occur, but since this case is utopian, we have to go with another way. To detect and expel the attacker from the network before any loss to Intellectual Property has occurred, because if the cyber criminals have the IP, war is lost.
Imagine if perpetrators gain access to card authentication codes. One such case was reported in 2014, in Europe where 100’s of millions of Euros, were stolen from banks and ATMs after the code was implanted. Many more thefts occur more frequently then they get recorded.
Clearly the nature of attacks has turned more sophisticated and with increasing technological sophistication we must change our ways of securing our digital fences. Behavioral Attack Detection systems or any other technologies which detect the attack before or during its attack and takes preventive steps to stop it is extremely important.
