Reinforcing Cloud Security defences, threat detection, and response capabilities is critical for all organisations operating in the cloud environment. In this insightful Cyber Security Masterclass, cyber security experts at Forge Technologies and our partner, Evalian, shared vital advice for Cloud Security in 2024, including key steps to creating a robust Cloud Cyber Security strategy.
Here is a summary of the main points we covered:
Cyber threats are nothing new, but they are something all businesses need to be prepared for and the number of cyber attacks is growing in 2024.
No doubt you'll be familiar with all of these, but you'll see them again in 2024. Expect off-the-shelf ransomware, off-the-shelf phishing, and denial of service products.
While not directly a cyber attack, businesses need to be aware of the current geopolitical instability across the world right now, which can also have an impact. In addition, with the advent of AI, there are far more possibilities for misinformation and deep fakes, which can be used to fool people into handing over sensitive information.
Given the statistics we're seeing, it's also very much a case of when, not if, you'll experience a cyber attack, so the key thing for 2024 is preparation.
Businesses are now increasingly turning to cloud technology, and what we're finding is that they often have multiple different cloud products to operate their business. There'soften a mix of vendors, there'soften a mix of public and private, and hybrid cloud environments.
Zero Trust architecture is a strategy and a framework that you must design, because it stretches across multiple infrastructure components. It's the principle that we now no longer trust individuals, and we no longer trust devices. The key six key areas in a Zero Trust architecture are:
That's a vast amount of IT infrastructure and very complicated areas to deal with. So, we believe in 2024, there will be a lot more focus on how we go about building our strategies and building a roadmap to get us to a Zero Trust type architecture, which helps us then secure multi-cloud environments.
We talked about AI as a cause for concern, but we've already seen a massive adoption of AI across security tool sets, and we've seen several vendors now integrating AI into their security tools. And in 2024, we should see this continue to grow. And, the functionality of what AI can do for us as a business should increase within 2024. We believe further development and adoption by customers should help drive some cost efficiencies, remove the human error element, and assist with better, faster decision-making processes. Because as we adopt more security, there are more touchpoints, there are more areas to look at. Using some of those AI capabilities means that we can drive some of those efficiencies.
Our focus in 2024 is around building bespoke applications, pipeline development, and software development life cycles. And as we develop more across multiple clouds, this development will get more complicated, and we need to look at the DevOps process to make sure that at the start of any kind of development, we're talking about integrated security. We have to consider where we store our current development data, such as repositories, and how secure they are. What is the kind of content we're storing inside them? What is the approval process for that continuous pipeline delivery? As we scale, as we try to automate, as AI also helps us try to speed up development life cycles, we need to make sure that we're doing things in a secure way, and the right way, from the beginning.
We can't be completely precise about current cyber security statistics as there are certainly companies out there who have suffered one or more attacks but didn't report it. As you might imagine, any company that offers cyber security protection, password protection, protection of sensitive data, or other similar services is hardly going to be pleased to admit that to the world. Such admissions can lead to reputation damage, loss of clients, and even losses on the stock market.
However, here are just a few statistics to be aware of:
Given as we said earlier that it's now a case of when, not if you'll experience a cyber attack. If you're one of these statistics, it's time to get up to date and plan to deal with this.
There are countless examples of cyber attacks on some extremely large companies, but here are just two:
Unknown hackers cyber attacked LastPass in 2022. Given that they generate, store, and protect passwords for countless customers across the world, this was quite an embarrassment, and they did suffer from damage to their reputation. Hackers managed to identify and exploit a specific developer for the company, compromising their laptop.
Minecraft is a hugely popular game and yet it, too, suffered from a cyber attack in 2020-21. Gamers exploited the Logj4 vulnerability and made the game unplayable.
To deal with the possibility of cyber attacks, we need to start a security plan place. The first step in defining a security plan of action is to understand what your risks are. You can then make informed decisions about the controls you apply, and the money and resources you're willing to throw at the problem.
Our cyber security experts are available to chat to and get advice, so please do give us a call if you need help.
Also, stay tuned for our next webinar in the Cyber Security Masterclass series!