Imagine a cyberattack hitting a giant tech company even after following the best practices! Millions of people are affected. The first question that will obviously come to the minds of the affected users is whether the tech company will know for certain who had conducted the attacks.
Without this, it will be very hard to strike back and take the necessary measures to adjust the company’s security. Here are common reasons why companies fail to stop cyberattacks despite following best practices.
Employees’ error
Research shows that most cyberattacks can be prevented with better people-management protocols. Everyone is prone to making errors. It’s hard to avoid mistakes, especially when working in a busy environment. That’s why attackers target the employees working in the company to infiltrate the company’s systems.
Most hackers are highly-skilled and understand most of the security practices better than a number of employees. That’s why you should enforce secure file sharing in your company. According to Mango Practice Management, you can replace password-protected PDFs with more straightforward link-based sharing that is highly protected. This ensures that hackers looking to steal data won’t access your files.
High dependency on Open Source software
One of the reasons most companies fail to stop cyberattacks is the high dependency on Open Source software. Of late, it has become the backbone of all new-age cloud products. Here, it’s easier to refer to a library developed by a person or group of people than to write code from scratch. Most companies will often use this shortest method as it’s easily affordable and takes less time.
In this case, the focus shifts to business problems rather than worrying about the Open Source code’s risk to the company. This may be a paradox for any new type of vulnerabilities that the company might not be aware of. Still, the product’s source code can be a backdoor for the attackers.
Collaborative development style
Systems used by most of the companies were developed through a collaborative approach. Here, the code is not written by a single organization but rather a contribution of individual developers worldwide. These developers may not always have good intentions as you may think. They may leak critical information about your company application later.
On the other hand, not every developer can write a good code or program to test the boundary conditions where the code can break. Sometimes the developers may have the ability to test the code but lack a testing environment or business use case to verify each possibility.
Diversified development stacks and programming languages
Most developers do not understand the risk they pose to companies by using diversified development stacks and programming languages. In this case, it’s a humongous task for the company to keep track of every library used in their product.
Sometimes the core team that developed the libraries may lose interest in it, which makes it challenging for the companies as they know they must replace it with some new alternative. Failure to do this, the company will be vulnerable to cyberattacks because the libraries that were once used are now not being taken care of.
Taking advantage of the host operating system
Most of the attackers focus on the vulnerabilities of the host operating system to hack companies. The software development process takes time, and it involves improving the errors of the current version to a new and safer operating system. It takes a few years for the vulnerabilities in the operating system to be identified and marked as known vulnerabilities.
Here, extensive research is usually done to ensure that the updates released are not having the same issues. During this time, attackers might take advantage of the loophole or a backdoor and perform malicious activity on your system.