As mobile phones became more sophisticated, their usage shifted from being communication oriented to application oriented. But phone numbers were never intended to be used as secure identifiers – their purpose is to simply act as subscriber identifiers during call routing. When applications use phone numbers in their login processes, it can give attackers and hackers an advantage.
Here are a few ways in which your OTP can be intercepted by hackers:
A brute-force attack is a type of cybercrime which involves automated hacking activity using bots. The primary aim of a brute-force attack is to crack a password in order to gain access to a user account in an unauthorized manner. Using the automation tool, an attacker repetitively attempts different alpha-numeric combinations at considerable speed – thousands per second – until the user’s password is determined and the account is unlocked.
With the advent of the cloud and the rapid innovations in technology, a brute-force attack has emerged as one of the most common types of outsider attack against web applications.
Privilege abuse – that is the security threat that your business’s IT team is most worried about. According to a survey conducted in March 2014 among more than 4000 IT security executives, over 88% of them fear that users who have access to the organization’s applications and data are the ones who are most likely to compromise it and lead to a security breach.
Privilege abuse, or privileged user abuse, refers to the inappropriate or fraudulent use of permitted access to applications and data. This could be done, either maliciously, accidentally or through ignorance of policies. In addition to causing financial losses, such insider breaches also damage the organization’s reputation, sometimes irreparably.
War seems to have taken a new form in the Information age. Large corporations have reported increased data breaches in the last couple of years and the number is all set to increase in 2019.
Domain Name System (DNS) is an addressing system used by the internet through which domain names are located and translated into internet protocol (IP) addresses. When a user attempts to access a website through an internet browser, a DNS query is performed. The DNS server matches the request to the respective IP address of the domain and responds to the query by loading the requested web page on the user’s browser.
So what is DNS Filtering? It is a technique by which access to specific websites, web pages, or IP addresses, can be blocked or permitted. If a DNS filter is in place, the IP address being returned from the DNS server will be checked before it is permitted to load on the user’s browser. Therefore, DNS filtering ensures that the user is protected from online threats like viruses, malware, ransomware, and so on. DNS web filtering can also be used to block inappropriate websites and web pages that the user may be searching for, especially at the workplace.
Identity management encompasses several operational mechanisms for managing users across a large system or network of applications. Two of the most prominent of those are Single Sign-on (SSO) and Federated Identity Management. Due to its evolving nature, identity and access management has several terms thrown around ambiguously. Even among developers, major differences are often missed while talking about federated identity and SSO. In this article, we aim to break down the difference between the two.
Would you trust just anyone to enter your home? Or would you first confirm that you know them and they have the right to be there?
The Zero Trust Model (ZTM) of security follows a similar principle. The ZTM approach is to be aware of anything entering the company, whether from inside or outside the company’s perimeter.
ZTM simply verifies everything that requires access to the system. The approach does not necessarily decree that every request should be denied. Instead, it asks: Why is access needed? How far? How long?
An Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution allows organizations to manage user access to critical data. It is an intermediate layer between your users and your applications/data.
Deploying an IAM solution a proven way to improve network security in an organization. A good IAM solution should also reduce the time spent by your IT team to grant access for individual applications, thereby improving architectural simplicity and reducing the load on your servers. This also means that your users have to remember only one set of credentials to access several applications in your on-premise or cloud network.
Apart from data security, data privacy represents a major area of concern in IT security today. When it comes to data privacy, all organizations are very particular about where and how their company data is being saved, and who has access to it.
This is also related to one of the major reasons why organizations still hesitate to move their data to the cloud – “who else has access to my data if I move to cloud?” Even though almost every IaaS and PaaS provider tries to build confidence in their clients through certifications by authorized agencies, many enterprises are still not convinced. The reason is that there are still areas that lack transparency, where details on their data privacy are not clearly explained and conveyed to them.
Migration to the cloud is no longer an emerging trend. It is now a well-established method of running the operations of a business. With the cloud, you can manage data and applications in a secure environment and ensure that your users face virtually no latency while using your applications. But although the cloud comes with a basic framework for security, it still has its inherent security risks which need highly specific cloud security solutions to reliably protect your data.
To understand the need for implementing an effective cloud security solution, a deeper understanding of what causes and constitutes a cloud security threat is important.
