Ensuring Cybersecurity in the Digital Era

By Meghna Misra-Elder

Following the major outage last month (8th June) that affected a number of high-profile websites like Amazon, Reddit, the UK government website, the Financial Times, the Guardian and the New York Times, security professionals are questioning the reliance of the internet infrastructure in the hands of just a few dominant companies. The outage was caused by a configuration error at the cloud computing provider Fastly. Fastly, as by now we all know, is one of the largest content delivery networks (CDNs) alongside networks operated by Akamai, Cloudflare and Amazon’s CloudFront.

This, according to experts, was one of the world’s biggest web outages to date and should act as a wake-up call for Governments and security professionals across the world. Over the past few years the internet infrastructure has become dangerously over-centralised and as a result is more at risk than ever and lacks resilience. Furthermore, the major shift towards digitisation of services in the past year has made us even more vulnerable as we depend on the internet for just about anything. This dependence, I think, will only grow and security professionals should seriously think about the resilience and security of our digital infrastructure going forward.

While the outage in June was particularly significant, it is not an isolated incident; we have seen a growing number of cyber-attacks targeting businesses, government, and medical organisations while they have been busy dealing with COVID. This outage and the numerous cyber-attacks should be seen as an opportunity by Governments and businesses alike to revisit and revise their security strategies to align with the ever-evolving landscape.

We spoke to Indusface, a leading application security SaaS company, on their views on the incident and more broadly on the vulnerabilities of cyber networks across the world and how can they be protected. This is what they had to say:

‘Cyberattacks are more commonplace than ever today, and no business, big or small, is immune to the drastic consequences of these attacks. Cyber threats and hacking techniques have evolved significantly and are much more sophisticated and complex in today’s digital age. Unfortunately, innovation and advancements in technology like API calls from other apps/IOT devices, Machine Learning, and AI have only brought about newer and more dangerous threats. However, new technology has also helped enhance cybersecurity solutions to fight these new threats. It is up to each business to secure themselves and their customers with a robust and intelligent cybersecurity solution.’

Indusface secures critical Web, Mobile & API applications of 2000+ global customers using its award winning fully managed platform that integrates web application scanner, web application firewall, DDoS, BOT Mitigation, CDN and threat intelligence engine.

The company has been funded by Tata Capital Growth Fund, is Great Place to Work certified, mentioned by analysts like Gartner and Forrester in their reports and has been the recipient of many awards such as the Economic Times Top 25, NASSCOM DSCI Top Security Company, Deloitte Asia Top 100 and several other such prestigious recognitions.

Indusface is giving a 14-day free trial, as a special limited offer to companies interested in their services. To avail of the offer, visit https://www.indusface.com/ or contact sales@indusface.com.


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