The Importance of Understanding the Motivations Behind Data Breaches

Why Cybersecurity Matters for Online Applications?

Enterprises have to keep up with the demands of the market and the needs of their customers. As businesses move their functionality to the digital channel, they face cybersecurity risks. The motives of attackers behind these risks are many and can include inventory manipulation, causing downtime, fraud, and obtaining personally identifiable information, among other things. It is essential for businesses to protect their online applications as important as deploying them to meet customer requirements. In this report, we will delve into various motives of attackers and the ways to protect online applications from breaches.

Understanding the Motives of Attackers

Attackers have different motives for their actions. They may damage the brand reputation, make use of the application for fraud, obtain personally identifiable information, move to other resources or applications, or leverage access to legitimate business applications for onward social engineering purposes. The motives of attackers need to be understood to find ways to protect applications.

The Importance of Protecting Online Applications

Protecting online applications from attack is as important as deploying them to keep the business running. Businesses often overlook the importance of adequately protecting their online applications, despite the possibility of serious financial and regulatory consequences.

Ways to Protect Online Applications

There are several ways to protect online applications from different types of attacks. Building in security from the start is essential, and adding protections in a layered approach around an application is equally important. Following are some of the standard protections:

Web Application Firewall

Web application firewalls are industry standards for protecting online applications. They are not perfect protection but are part of a defense-in-depth strategy. They defend against different kinds of attacks that may be launched against an online application.

DDoS Protection

Bot networks can be used by attackers to point a cacophony of requests at an online application to bring it down. Businesses must ensure that they have distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protections at Layers 3, 4, and 7 to preemptively mitigate the risks of brand reputation damage, downtime, lost revenue, and other damages that result from these attacks.

Bot Protection

Bots are weaponized for various purposes such as inventory manipulation, fraud, and data theft. Advanced bot protection is necessary to protect online applications from these risks.

Fraud Mitigation

Fraudsters use legitimate applications to make money at the expense of users. Businesses must be able to detect and mitigate fraud in near real-time without introducing unnecessary friction for legitimate customers.

API Discovery

Maintaining a proper inventory of infrastructure in complex, hybrid environments is a challenge. An API discovery solution can help businesses to ensure that they are aware of all assets and adequately protecting them.

Telemetry

Collecting telemetry data at Layer 7 and user layer is important to gain important insights into what is happening within the application and the way a user is behaving within the application.

Continuous Monitoring

No matter how good the defenses are, continuous monitoring is required to detect and respond to breaches. Protective controls and defenses can be circumvented at some point, and when they are, businesses will need to fall back on detective controls and defenses to protect their online applications.

Conclusion

The “why” of a data breach matters, particularly when it comes to the ramifications of a breach. By understanding different motives, businesses can make decisions about protecting their online applications. Protecting online applications requires a layered approach and continuous monitoring to mitigate the risks of data breaches.