Emerging Technology For Information Security

Technology as a field spans many sub-fields that aim to provide different services to its users. We know the growth in information and resources to handle this information is increasing in exponential rate. To distinguish legitimate information from the huge amount of information available and secure it from external sources is a very challenging task. Technology has stepped in to play a huge role in securing the information and resources handling this information. Technology for Information Security or more popularly known as Cyber Security is a vast area in technology that aims to provide security to information over various kinds of attacks.

The two main reasons to secure information are attacks from intruders and unexpected system failures.

Unexpected system failures might result in huge data and information loss. Backup and Retrieval is a must have feature in organizations maintaining huge amounts of information. Technology is used for maintaining a backup of information and retrieving the information in a cost-efficient manner. Usage of cloud services for backup of data is the most used to strategy in today’s world. Backup data can be stored in three different places based upon the user’s requirements:

• Disk or Tape Backup: This method involves backup of data to a local device, which mounts disks or tapes to hold data.
• Cloud Backup: Sending the data to cloud for backup directly and paying for the cloud storage resources that are used is mainly termed as cloud backup.
• Hybrid Cloud Backup: It is basically an intermediate version of the above two methods where backup data is first stored in a local device and then stored on to the cloud based on capacity requirement.

VMWare vCenter Server and Veritas NetBackup are some of the most popular software’s used for data backup. They are software’s designed for both Windows and Linux based servers and works as a centralized management software for backup of client’s data.

These technologies are still not part of Engineering courses curriculum but many colleges across the country offer additional courses to teach cyber security courses which prepare the students for technical industry experience beforehand. B.Tech. Colleges are known for offering additional courses in Data Security.

Apart from natural failures, Data attacks from intruders can cause more damage to the data and requires wide range of measures to be taken to protect the data from attackers. There are different types of attacks that can lead to data loss, unavailability or inaccessibility.

• Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack causes legitimate users to be unable to access the information.
• Man-in-the-Middle attack refers to an intruder mocking any user or resource in a network of two people or resources.
• Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attack is injection of attacker’s scripts into webpages to extract information from the websites.
• Phishing is basically an attacker disguising as a legitimate user and trying to hack passwords, usernames and other such information.

Many such attacks cause great loss to the organization holding sensitive data. Technology again plays an important role in detecting and preventing such attacks. Authorization should be very strongly built for any attacker to drop-in attacks. Some of the technical applications used in securing data from attackers are:

• Hardware and Software Authentication: Use of both hardware and software to authorize users can build a strong authentication system. IOT is a useful system for the authentication which builds smart systems using biometrics that are difficult to be attacked.
• Anti-virus Software: Many anti-virus softwares exist to protect a system from other malicious user or software attacks. These softwares detect the malicious data or users at an early stage and prevent them causing damage to the user’s system.
• User-behaviour Analytics: Tracking the actions of the user’s using softwares which generate information about exceptional or fraudulent users. This information can be used to prevent such users from causing harm to the data.
• Using Cloud Technology Services: It is efficient to use cloud services to store and manage data instead of physically hosting and managing storage devices which can be more prone to attacks.
• Deep Learning: Using the deep learning algorithms to predict the fore coming attacks or problems to take actions beforehand can be a great area of research as it is still in developing stage.

Technology has its applications everywhere and its contribution to securing data is immense and evolving to provide higher and efficient security features to protect information. Ethical Hacking is one of the professions that tries to break down the system in the attacker’s point of view to check the strength of the security features of a system. Evolving technology makes it simpler to provide security to systems.