Advancing Cybersecurity for Digital Transformation: Opportunities and Challenges

Introduction

In recent times, cybersecurity has become a global challenge for many enterprises wanting to transform digital business activities. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the FBI has seen a fourfold increase in cybersecurity complaints, whereas the global losses from cybercrime exceeded $1 trillion in 2020 (Gurinaviciute 2021). And the loss figures keeps increasing. In a study conducted by IBM (2021), the data reported that internal and external threats account for 51%, which involve malicious attacks, 25% that involve IT/business process failures, and 24%, which are due to human error. As more and more activities during Covid-19 pandemic are shifting over the digital platform providing newer business opportunities, at the same time the risks, threats and challenges associated with cybersecurity for the enterprise has exponentially increased to the highest levels. Though the enterprise and government institutions have considered seriously implementing cybersecurity solutions, they fall short of addressing the core problems of keeping the cyberspace safe (ACSC 2021) because of the dispersed nature of the internet. The nature and the global scope of cybersecurity attacks makes it difficult to secure the cyberspace, which is used by billions of people and the digital devices, which makes it a massive market for the cyberattackers. The cybersecurity threats and attacks can be categorised as human, and machine created. Cisco (2021) defines cybersecurity as the practice of protecting systems, networks, and programs from digital attacks from cybercriminals.

These cyberattacks are usually aimed at accessing, changing, manipulating, or destroying sensitive information; extorting money from users; or interrupting normal business processes. Implementing effective cybersecurity measures is particularly challenging today because there are more devices than people, and attackers are becoming more innovative in their business. There can be number of motivations for the cyberattacks such as political, financial, accessing private and confidential information, identity theft, cryptocurrency theft, destruction to essential infrastructure and public utilities such as energy, water, telecommunication, transportation, and others such as manufacturing, banking, and hospitals which are critical sources for providing important services to the society and often the victims (e.g., people, computer systems, and enterprises) of such cyberattacks are affected on a vast scale. The modus operandi of cyber attackers is to either completely (or partially) shut down or do maximum damage to gain control of the computer systems which can then lead to achieving their objectives. One of the important characteristics of cyber attackers is that they are highly skilled in breaking into computer systems, by identifying and studying the weaknesses of those systems either through software codes, operating systems, or through other weaknesses in computer networks (e.g., wireless networks). Once they have found and studied the weakness, they exploit the system by gaining access to control and stealing sensitive confidential information or by infecting the system through malicious programs that can inflict heavy damages.

As hackers grow more sophisticated in their business, securing the IT infrastructure has become more and more complex. The human created threats such as a hacker stealing vast array of confidential data, getting to access to peoples personal & financial records, conducting illegal activities, and selling sharing unauthorised data. Whereas the machine created threats are more serious and rapid and deeply destructive and have the capability of infecting machines globally at a speed unimaginable, such as malicious software’s unknowingly and without user’s permission installed through accessing malicious emails and websites, which then are virally distributed over a vast global network doing destruction activities to millions of digital devices on the way and to the hardware, software, networks, and to the worldwide web. In order to safeguard and keep vulnerabilities at minimum, enterprises need a multi-layered approach to server security with visibility into each of these layers: hardware, firmware, hypervisor, and the operating system (IBM 2021). Recent cyberattacks have shown operating systems such as Microsoft Windows are more vulnerable because of its weaknesses in software codes. Many users are still using the Windows legacy systems, and large numbers of computers globally having the legacy systems and are more easily attacked as the software upgrades have not been completed, and some older versions of the Windows software are no longer supported for upgrades by Microsoft which means the users are left by themselves.