Computer Security has been required for a long time now. Hackers and attackers have been vying with security agencies and cyber police for the better part of a decade. When you look at how things were 10 years ago, you realize life for the cyber police was really simple back then. The most that they had to do was track novice attackers who would only infect users with malware like Trojan horse.
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The degree of harm caused by attackers was never a serious issue back then. However, things have changed for the worse in the past 10 years. Cybercrime is one of the most dangerous agents of destruction for major government organizations or financial firms. Where hackers in the past only played with the users’ data for a while or delete a few files, hackers today used focused approaches to achieve specific goals like accessing sensitive data, stealing financial details, shutting down entire servers, etc. We take a look at the 5 major changes to computer security in the past decade:
No one has been spared
At some point in their lives, everyone has fallen victim to hackers and attackers. Be it something minor like email accounts being compromised or exposing of personal details like financial statements, we have all been done by hackers. They are certainly not selective in choosing their victims.
Breach Detection has improved
With hackers increasing their activity by leaps and bounds, security systems of companies all over the world have reinforced their breach detection systems to safeguard their systems and servers from falling prey to attackers. Since they lay excess emphasis on prevention of calamities rather than solving them once they happen, such detections have become quite sophisticated to thwart the attempts of attackers and fending them off before they get the chance to be naughty.
Hacking has become a business
Hacking has become a serious business now. Many hacking groups have replaced the inexperienced hackers that worked with minimal views and aspirations. These groups have notoriously caused huge financial losses to major firms as well as exposed their sensitive information and secrets. This is one of the most horrendous of the changes to computer security that the world has seen in the past 10 years.
Many of these hacking groups work directly or indirectly with national governments, where they are asked to infiltrate the system of other countries. All this is done in a bid to gain supremacy over the other. Power has been mistreated as a tool for human dominance as it is something that makes humans its tool.
Hackers have become professional and quite meticulous in their jobs, and the power play between the nations all over the world will only aggravate this situation.
Improved Encryption Techniques
Everyone knows that the best way to keep your data secure and confidential is to keep it encrypted. Encryption is a barrier that hackers have to breach in order to gain access to the data they want. Although hackers have become technologically better equipped by leaps and bounds, security agencies have been up to the task with newer and much better encryption schemes to protect sensitive data while it is stored in their systems or being exchanged on a server.
Higher Levels of Authentication
In the past, only top government sectors and agencies employed authentication policies for their workers and systems so as to prevent security breaches. Now, all major corporations focus on this aspect of security. Whether the authentication is physical like biometric access to certain assets or cyber authentication, the bar has been raised by quite a few notches over the past decade.
