Impact of Covid-19 on cyber Security

The Covid-19 pandemic is an unforeseen occurrence that took the world by storm. Governments and businesses were unprepared, hence the large-scale impact it continuously has on the planet. It has permanently revolutionised how we live, work and interact with technology. With this new way of living, businesses and governments had to adapt to a new form of survival, and so did cybercriminals; there was a surge in cyber threats due to our newfound dependence on technology. This paper emphasises the common types of cyber threats and the targeted industries. These attacks were more successful because people were uneasy and desperate, which gave the criminals more incentive to attack businesses. To avoid being a cyber target, I have provided recommendations against future threats.

Crafting Strategies of Security Breaches

In recent years, the number of financial technology players and users have increased at a significant rate due to the rapid technological advancement in financial technology. While smart devices are providing more useful features to users, they have also made it possible for cyber threats to migrate from desktops to smart devices. Thus, it is important for smart device users to be aware that their device could be exposed to cyber threats and that users could protect their devices by employing data-centric cyber security measures. This study reveals how financial technology business model responded to the breach phenomenon by employing data-centric protection approaches. The result is very interesting. Data-centric security is very needed as it is capable of protecting data as a whole. It provides a gapless protection, meaning to say, the data are encrypted and classified wherever it moves. With persistent protection and cross-platform operability, data-centric security will eliminate gaps and keep data protected.

Enterprise Security

As we increasingly depend on technology, cyber threats and vulnerabilities are creating trust issues for businesses and enterprises, and cybersecurity is being considered as the number one threat to the global economy over the next 5-10 years. In this chapter, the authors explain this phenomenon by first describing the changing cyber ecosystem due to extreme digitalization and then its ramifications that are plainly visible in the latest trends in cyber-attacks. In the process, they arrive at five key implications that any modern enterprise needs to be cognizant of and discuss eight emerging measures that may help address consequences of those implications substantially. It is hoped that these measures will play a critical role in making enterprise security more proactive, cognitive, automated, connected, invisible, and risk aware.

Cybersecurity and Privacy in the Age of the Pandemic

The unprecedented acceleration of digital transformation in response to the pandemic migrated businesses and people to the always connected world of the internet. The reliance on digital technologies introduced novel cyber threats that increasingly targeted the human factor. As people had to face technology-mediated information overload, navigate health concerns and anxiety regarding the virus, and balance life and work in their hybrid offices, arguably cybersecurity and privacy concerns may have been overlooked.

A Comparative Study in Israel and Slovenia Regarding the Awareness, Knowledge, and Behavior Regarding Cyber Security

With the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations and institutions moved to e-learning and to e-working from home. With the increase in internet usage, the rate of cyber-attacks have also increased, and this was followed by the request for more cyber security behaviors from employees and students. In the current study, the authors explore the connection between cyber security awareness, cyber knowledge, and cyber security behavior. The authors measured the behaviors among students in two similar countries: Israel and Slovenia. Results show that students felt they had adequate awareness on cyber threat but apply only a few protective measures to protect their devices, usually relatively common and simple ones. The study findings also show that awareness to cyber threats mediate the connection between knowledge and protection behaviors, but only in the case that the knowledge is specific with regard to IT protection courses. Results, implications, and recommendations for effective cyber security training programs for organizations and academic institutions are presented and discussed.

Cyber Awareness Exercises: Virtual vs On-site Participation & the Hybrid Approach

This paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of executing cyber awareness exercises in two different formats: Virtual vs On-site participation. Two EU Agencies, EUSPA and ENISA have organized in the previous years Cyber Awareness exercises; a very important tool to enhance and test the organization's ability to put up resistance and respond to different cyber threats. The objective of this paper is to compare the outcomes of these awareness exercises, executed on-site through physical attendance prior to 2019 and virtually, in a remote setup in 2020, due to the restrictions posed by the pandemic of COVID-19. ENISA in collaboration with EUSPA have accumulated raw and diverse data from the evaluation reports of the cyber events mentioned above. The comparison of these data will focus on the most important success factors of a cyber awareness exercise such as: participation, cooperation (social interaction/teambuilding), effectiveness, fun, tools and identify how the location of the participants affects them. The aim of this work is to highlight through statistical analysis the benefits of a hybrid approach to the exercise’s setup, once combining elements of both virtual and on-site. Depending on the different kind of exercises, such a hybrid setup, will provide more flexibility to an exercise organizer and help maximize effectiveness, while adapting to the fluctuating working regimes of the near future; namely Teleworking. Furthermore, a modular exercise design will be proposed in order to adapt to the location limitations without impacting negatively the rate of the rest of factors analyzed.

Modelling Artificial Immunization Processes to Counter Cyberthreats

This paper looks at the problem of cybersecurity in modern cyber-physical and information systems and proposes an immune-like approach to the information security of modern complex systems. This approach is based on the mathematical modeling in information security—in particular, the use of immune methods to protect several critical system nodes from a predetermined range of attacks, and to minimize the success of an attack on the system. The methodological approach is to systematize the tasks, means and modes of immunization to describe how modern systems can counter the spread of computer attacks. The main conclusions and recommendations are that using an immunization approach will not only improve the security of systems, but also define principles for building systems that are resistant to cyber attacks. The immunization approach enables a symmetrical response to an intruder in a protected system to be produced rapidly. This symmetry provides a step-by-step neutralization of all stages of a cyber attack, which, combined with the accumulation of knowledge of the attacker’s actions, allows a base of defensive responses to be generated for various cyber attack scenarios. The theoretical conclusions are supported by practical experiments describing real-world scenarios for the use of immunization tools to protect against cyber threats.