An organization that has the ability to receive a lot of valuable information about its competitors has huge advantages in dealing with them. Means of ensuring the safety of the enterprise are very important, since only they will help to avoid any encroachments from the outside and prevent the decline of the company. Modern progress and active development have made companies dependent on the information system, as well as vulnerable to attack by hackers, computer viruses, state and human influence to such an extent that many co-founders and entrepreneurs simply cannot feel comfortable and safe.
Production protection
Legal means of ensuring industrial safety may be as follows:
- protective installations;
- blocking devices;
- restrictive devices;
- safety equipment;
- conducted alarm;
- Remedies.
Danger to the enterprise
In most cases, organizations lose a huge amount of financial documents, design and technological projects, passwords and logins to enter the network on their own sites. Especially serious damage can be caused by the discharge of personal data of employees of the enterprise. This phenomenon is especially common in Western countries, in which lawsuits due to such theft of information lead to the issuance of huge fines, after which enterprises often go bankrupt and cannot pay debts.
On July 8, 2017, one of the largest personal data leaks occurred at a credit company bureau in one of the cities of the United States. Information fraudsters managed to steal personal information from more than 143 million consumers and 209,000 credit card numbers. As a result of this process, the bureau shares fell 13%.
In some cases, it happens that the merged information negatively affects the state of the enterprise only after a few months or whole years after it happened (when it falls into the hands of competing organizations or journalists). It is for this reason that it is so important to remember the basic methods and means of ensuring security.
It is not necessary to divide the available information into important and not so. Everything related to the successful operation of the enterprise and not designed for public access should always be inside the company and carefully protected from any form of threat.
What protection methods exist?
According to GOST, methods and means of ensuring safety can be as follows:
- industrial safety equipment;
- socio-pedagogical means;
- collective protective equipment;
- ensuring personal safety.
What can lead to a drain of information?
When considering factors that could lead to information leakage and transmission to attackers, attention should be paid to the following factors.
- Inattentive attitude to their work by the employees themselves. The threat to information security may come from the employees of the enterprise themselves, who do not even suspect anything and do not want to harm in any way.
- An accidental theft of confidential data is often caused by an employee when he accidentally opens a phishing email, transfers the virus from a personal computer to the organization’s main server. Or, for example, he may accidentally copy a file with confidential information inside to his tablet, flash drive or PC for further work on a business trip. It is important to remember that not a single company is safe from sending data by negligent or inattentive employees. This method of extracting information is considered the easiest for an attacker.
Pirated software
Some company managers try to save financial resources and do not buy licensed software. But it is important to remember that unlicensed programs cannot provide complete protection against cybercriminals who are interested in information about the company and want to get it with virus programs.
A user with unlicensed software does not have any proven support, modern updates provided by computer program developers. Sometimes when working on the Internet, a PC captures viruses that affect security. According to a study by Microsoft, in 7% of unlicensed programs identified software programmed to steal personal data passwords.
DDoS attacks
DDoS attacks - a stream of false requests from a huge number of hosts located in different geographical locations that block the selected site in several ways. The first is a direct attack on the communication channel, which is completely blocked by a large amount of unnecessary information. The second - the attack is made on the resource server itself.
It should be noted that the poor work and inaccessibility of public sites due to attacks can continue for a long time (from 2 hours to several days). Most often, attacks of this type are used in competition, blackmailing companies or in order to divert the attention of system administrators from illegal actions, for example, theft of finances from the company's account. Experts are sure that DDoS attacks are carried out with the sole purpose of appropriating money. In most cases, the sites of banks become victims of cybercriminals (they were affected in half of the cases).
PC virus infection
The most dangerous and common type of violation of information security in today's world is viruses on the PC. This is confirmed by the multimillion-dollar damage caused by enterprises due to virus attacks. In recent years, the level of damage from such programs has increased significantly.
Experts attribute this to the fact that more and more channels for the smooth entry of viruses began to appear. Mail continues to occupy the first place in virus infection, although the number of objects suitable for virus attacks only continues to increase. If earlier viruses spread, as a rule, to servers of standard web services, now viruses can also act on firewalls, routers, mobile phones, switches.
GOST methods and safety tools
Although the range of threats is constantly expanding, and viruses are rapidly updated, information security developers continue to actively develop more and more new methods and programs.
For each threat, create their own defenses and constantly improve existing ones. The main means of ensuring security should include physical methods of protecting information flows. They represent a restriction or a complete prohibition of access by unauthorized persons to the territory of the enterprise, checkpoints at which specialized employee identification systems are installed. Increasingly, modern organizations have begun to use HID-cards that monitor access. For example, when using this function, only those people who have direct access to them can go to the server or other important office department.
Technical means
Technical means of ensuring security are considered no less effective for the enterprise. This important factor is anti-virus programs and special e-mail filtering systems that help protect the user from spam (suspicious messages that are strictly prohibited to follow). Corporate mailboxes must necessarily possess similar systems. In addition, it is important to create limited access to available information by regularly changing passwords.
Anti-DDoS
Anti-DDoS forces and security tools are widely used. It is not possible to defend correctly and effectively against DDoS attacks on your own. Many software security vendors offer special services to combat this type of fraud. When using such methods, as soon as traffic of an unusual kind or quality is detected in the system, a protection system that detects and blocks harmful intrusions comes into force. At the same time, business traffic arrives without any special obstacles. The system can operate a huge number of times until the danger is completely eliminated.
Copy data
Data backup is the storage of important information files not only on the main PC, but also on other devices: on the server or on external media. Recently, the most effective service has become the remote storage of various information in the cloud storage. It is this method of copying that will help provide the enterprise with full protection in an emergency, for example, when the authorities seize the server. You can back up and restore information at any suitable time, as well as from anywhere.
Disaster recovery
Another system and security tool is disaster recovery. This is the latest data recovery measure. This method is very important for each enterprise in order to quickly get rid of the risk of downtime and ensure the continuity of the organization. If a company for some reason cannot get access to information, then having a plan of this type can significantly reduce the time it takes to restore an information system and prepare it for further work.
The plan must necessarily include the ability to enter an emergency code, which can be used if the system crashes. Recovery must be worked out without fail, taking into account all the changes that have occurred in the system.
Data encryption
Encryption of data during transmission in electronic form is quite reliable. To ensure complete security and confidentiality of data during transmission in electronic format, different encryption methods should be used. Encryption helps confirm the authenticity of the transmitted information, ensure its protection during file storage on open media, protect software and other enterprise resources from unauthorized copying and other manipulations.
Information Security and Its Importance
Information security is understood to mean the protection of information content and the company as a whole from intentional or accidental actions that damage the enterprise and its founders. Providing methods and means of security with information technology is very important. The most important thing for the organizer is to pay attention to the prevention of risks, and not to combat the consequences that have already come. Precisely preventive measures to ensure information security, its integrity and accessibility only to a certain circle of people - this is the most correct approach in creating a reliable system.
Any leakage of information as a result can cause dangerous problems for the entire company - both large financial losses and liquidation of the organization. Of course, problems with information leakage have appeared and have existed for a long time: industrial espionage and the luring of highly qualified specialists were widely used even before computerization.
But precisely because of the appearance of the first personal computer, as well as the Internet, new methods of illegally obtaining information files appeared. If earlier for this it was necessary to steal and take out a huge amount of securities and documents from competitors, now all the necessary information can simply be transferred to a compact flash drive, sent via the network using a family of rootkits, botnets, trojans, and various viruses.