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The Paradigm Shift in Cybersecurity

As quickly as advances in cybersecurity are moving forward, organizations are struggling to keep up with cyberthreats.
Kiran Palla
Contributing CIO

I still remember buying Norton’s antivirus CD for $19.99 while waiting in line at a CompUSA store back in the day. I had to ask the tech if the virus scan would improve my x.486 PC’s performance. But that was then. Six months ago, I oversaw the development of a machine learning algorithm that applies predictive analytics on cybersecurity threats based on the patterns in network spoofing.

While working on this project, I noticed a shift in the mindset on coping with the never-ending race to boost cybersecurity. Innovation is moving at a blazing speed in this area. In this article, I will take you through the evolution of cybersecurity from reactive to proactive, and now, to a predictive nature.

The original anti-virus scanning was a reactive way of addressing the cybersecurity threat by adding more libraries based on the newly discovered viruses. We used to connect to the Norton center to download the latest virus updates.

Later, the AV evolved as next-generation AV, where the threats are analyzed with AI/ML predictive analytics algorithms. Around the same time, several other techniques were introduced such as app containerization, allowing the monitoring of applications in a sandbox environment, and applying the necessary fixes in the environment to mitigate the risk. The introduction of threat intelligence made a significant impact on cybersecurity maturity. These programs track the Operating System (OS) events, check the file names and commands, and continuously look at patterns.

cybersecurity paradigm shift evolution of cybersecurity

Threat intelligence brought the behavior-based analysis to augment the predictive analysis where the programs or agents check the processes, network connections, file/registry changes, and overall patterns in malicious activities. Threat intelligence with Behavior-Based analysis is proven to be the most promising organizational readiness activity for cybersecurity preparedness.

The in-memory analysis is another advanced technique that looks at the processes running in memory for insider attacks, new malware, and file-less states. This evolution from anti-virus scanning, a signature-based reactive scanning, to behavior-based predictive analysis took more than two decades, and I watched it evolve throughout my professional career.

The pandemic and ongoing digital transformation have brought new challenges and innovation opportunities to cybersecurity in digital empathy, zero trust, cyber resiliency, and a greater focus on integrated security. According to Microsoft, which tracks more than 8 trillion daily signals, threats during the peak of the pandemic attacked broader areas of business than before 2020. Remote working posed critical business challenges for cyber-safe remote work, and organizations still struggle to offer cyberthreat-proof remote working environments.

This evolution from anti-virus scanning, a signature-based reactive scanning, to behavior-based predictive analysis took more than two decades, and I watched it evolve throughout my professional career.

During these pandemic years, there has been a 47% increase in cyber threats. Hackers used the OpenBullet tool to launch cyber-attacks on video conferencing services, and more than 500 million customers were affected during the initial months of the pandemic. These challenges certainly provided a wealth of innovation in Cybersecurity, and we have to wait to see how the paradigm shift continues to evolve.

Unfortunately, those with malicious intentions dominate innovation compared to good actors, and threat actors come with multi-vector attacks by taking systems as hostages causing so much pain to all of us. For a major corporation to recover from a cyber-attack may take more than six months, and some may not even survive based on the magnitude of the attack. On the personal side, someone whose data is compromised must spend more than $10,000 to recover and future protection. Hopefully, cybersecurity will continue to outrun the pace of the threats that inevitably follow, leading to safer cyberspace.

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