Today, when it comes to cyberattacks, we have to accept reality: every computer or device can be hacked.
Stories about cybercrimes suffered by people in our inner circles are becoming increasingly common: phishing, carding, or identity theft are just some examples.
On a large scale, whether it is a private company or a public institution, both have become targets for cybercriminals and the economic and political effects can be catastrophic if an attack occurs.
Examples of this are the filtering that Twitter suffered in mid-2022, affecting millions of users[1], and the attack on FlagStar Bank in the United States also in 2022[2] that caused the data exposure of 1.5 million customers such as social security numbers, and bank and personal information.
According to the IBM Pokemon Survey[3], the cost of data breaches can cost up to $4 million per incident.
So, in the digital revolution world we live, where the adoption and the continuous change of technologies such as AI, IoT, 5G or the exponential increase of mobile devices are fast, the challenges of cybersecurity for organizations are increasingly important.
For this reason, in this article we share with you five cybersecurity risks that deserve attention in 2023 and that, with the help of edge computing technology, can be prevented.
1. Data Breach
This has been one of the main concerns of organizations in recent years. The reality is that identifying or containing a data breach can take companies an average of 277 days, so counting on computer protection tools that help reduce this time can prevent high economic losses.
This can be achieved through integration with an edge computing platform, as this guarantees complete protection against threats such as those listed in the OWASP Top 10, including application layers such as injection, access violation, and escalation of privileges.
Choosing the right technology is essential to ensure the integrity and correctly segmenting the application. It’s very important to choose a platform that allows the creation of security mechanisms based on user flows, such as rules based on headers, virtual paths, and GEOIP
2. Mobile Devices Attacks
It’s estimated that attacks on mobile devices have increased by 50% since 2019[4]. It means that our smartphones should be better protected than ever from viruses or malware since this could compromise our financial information, emails, photos, messages, etc.
This requires that companies that depend on online services such as e-commerce or internet banking invest in the development of modern security solutions that allow them to guarantee the protection of their applications in environments with high levels of traffic.
Edge computing solutions like WAF make that possible since they:
- Allow real-time processing
- Guarantee safety and performance
- Allows the configuration of security functions such as ReCaptcha, JWT, Web Token, and Bot Manager
- Protect against malicious actions that consume bandwidth and increase traffic
- Makes it possible to apply security rules according to the “Discovery” API, which allows more complete rules
One of the first actions of an attacker is to apply inverse engineering to the application. When there are security rules based on the operation of your API, the attacker will need to understand the user access flow, making to reach his goal more difficult.
3. IoT and 5G Vulnerabilities
The 5G network was created to meet the exponential increase in information from millions of devices, it will become a reality with the IoT (Internet of Things), which opens up countless opportunities in the field of interconnectivity, but also raises concerns about vulnerabilities, attacks or errors of software.
As it’s a new network architecture, it must be protected from external attacks, so controlling possible data violations will depend on how sophisticated your security strategy is.
This is where counting on edge computing security tools makes sense—it allows the processing and analysis of data closer to the location they are created, at the edge of the network, enabling the solutions to be highly scalable and responsive to threats in real time. This, in turn, keeps the quality of the user experience.
4. Shortage of Cybersecurity Professionals
According to the Cybersecurity Workforce Study[5], the global gap in the cybersecurity workforce increased by 26% from 2021 to 2022, and it’s estimated that 3.4 million professionals are needed to protect assets worldwide effectively.
In addition, 70% of companies reported that they don’t have enough employees in the cybersecurity area. This means that organizations must seek solutions to remedy this weakness since doing so couldn’tt compromise their data.
Today, relying on a suitable edge computing provider can solve this problem as it allows:
- Managing the cybersecurity strategy of an organization
- Protecting applications from an edge platform
- Reducing costs and implementation times
- Avoiding vendor lock-in
- Managing different technologies on a single platform
- Blocking multi-layered attacks automatically
5. Cyberwar
Events such as the war in Ukraine make it clear that conflicts like this go beyond battlefield disputes, but also affect financial and cyberspace environments, where governments, institutions, and companies can be highly vulnerable.
Threats, espionage, or sabotage are just a few examples of how any vulnerability could compromise digital infrastructure, communication systems, or financial services anywhere.
These attacks range from DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) to introducing malicious software into critical infrastructure.
When it comes to DDoS, this type of attack is becoming more sophisticated and was one of the biggest concerns in 2022 since traditionally they were targeted at highly visible resources like a website, but now they are also horizontally spread.
This means that the attacks are directed at several targets at the same time, for example, several IPs of the same company.
Having a DDoS protection solution is a priority. Edge computing resources are optimal in this case, as they mitigate attacks closer to its source.
As the famous saying goes “better safe than sorry”. So preventing that from happening can prevent catastrophic damage to your business. Therefore, mitigating an attack at the source will prevent it from spreading to your entire network.
Conclusion
The continuous advance of technologies in the digital age has brought with it numerous advances and possibilities but it has made users and organizations targets of cybercrime.
Today, technologies such as edge computing are helping to alleviate this problem, based on solutions such as Azion Edge Firewall that allow detecting and mitigating sophisticated and emerging threats.
If you want to know more about what an edge computing platform can do for your security, read the success story of Agibank, the bank that is protected against sophisticated attacks thanks to the edge solutions of Azion. Or talk to one of our experts.
References
- The biggest data breaches and leaks of 2022 (Cyber Security Hub)
- 10 Biggest Data Breaches in Finance (UpGuard)
- Cost of data breach 2022 (IBM)
- Top 10 Cybersecurity Trends to Watch Out For in 2023 (Simplilearn)
- 2022 Cybersecurity Workforce Study (ISC)
