When companies neglect cybersecurity, customers become victims.

in #blockchain6 years ago (edited)

The internet has been never as unsafe as it is today.

The tactics and points of attack at the disposal of cyber criminals are numerous, and thus cybercrime has both grown and evolved in annual volume and means of attack. A cybercrime is a crime committed through and targeted at a computer device, including desktops, laptops, mobile phones, tablets, or any other device able to connect to the web.

Cybercrime can take shape in a variety of formats and can be sourced from individuals or groups with different motivating factors. Attacks can be committed by syndicated criminals, rogue states needing untraceable assets, and lone black-hat hackers who take advantage of individuals and companies who leave themselves vulnerable online. Cyber threats are fundamentally asymmetrical risks in that, small groups of individuals can cause disproportionately large amounts of damage. And it is disastrous for companies and large enterprises to be attacked with online hackings. Cybersecurity is now a must for everyone, but naturally, businesses and enterprises are prime targets due to the reward potential of breaching a major firm.

The Parallel Growth of the Cloud and Cybercrime

Today, companies of all scale rely on a major computational and data storage services that are given the umbrella term of the Cloud.

Cloud providers ensure that businesses needn’t concern themselves with data storage and online user traffic management. Thus, cloud services are used by everyone from neighborhood businesses that need a website or an application, to mutli billion-dollar enterprises serving millions of customers. Everything from proprietary company data to sensitive customer information is stored within clouds. Data has been dubbed many-a-times as the oil of the 21st century—and it is. All the data floating in the cloud is an easy target as a single breach can provide access to a massive treasure of data which can be sold on the black market.

While the Cloud has made it easier than ever to manage digital products like websites, applications, dApps, SaaS, etc., it has also made the entities that utilize the service vulnerable. Major data breaches, such as the one of Equifax, which led to exposure of financial data of tens of millions of Americans, are not an anomaly.

The aggregate loss of companies to cybercrime tallies in the billions every year. Thus, data breaches that impact major enterprises affect all their customers. The vulnerability of enterprises isn’t a threat to just their investors, it’s also a threat to everyone whose ever been their customer.

Improvement in cloud security measures is of paramount importance.

Stemming Solutions from Blockchain Technology

A novel cybersecurity operation leveraging blockchain technology asserts itself as the ideal enterprise cloud security and storage solution.

Cryptyk is an open source cyber-security platform benefitting all industries that are susceptible to cyber-security breaches, including banking, finance, law, insurance, healthcare, transport, logistics, media, construction and government. This technology seeks to displace single-source Cloud Storage Providers (CSPs), Cloud Access security Brokers (CASBs), Cloud security Gateways (CSGs), Storage Partitions, Anti-Virus Scanners, Threat Monitors, and many other security products. Cryptyk is all these and more combined in a single product.

Cybercrime has many faces and tactics. Two examples are:

  • Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS): A DDoS attack attempts to disrupt a network’s services. Attackers send high volumes of data or traffic through the network until it becomes overloaded and stops functioning. The incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources, potentially hundreds of thousands. This makes it impossible to stop the attack by blocking a single IP address, and makes it difficult to distinguish legitimate traffic from attack traffic.
  • Phishing: Often posing as a request for data from a trusted third party, phishing attacks are sent via email and ask users to click on a link and enter their personal data. It often involves psychological manipulation, invoking urgency or fear, and tricking unsuspecting individuals into handing over confidential information.

There are a couple concerning factors. First, phishing emails have become sophisticated and often look just like legitimate requests for information. Second, phishing technology is now being licensed out to cybercriminals, including on-demand phishing services and off-the-shelf phishing kits. Perhaps most concerning is the fact that dark web services have enabled cybercriminals to refine their campaigns and skills. In fact, phishing emails are six times more likely to be clicked than regular consumer marketing emails.

An Ecosystem for Security


The Cryptyk platform counters these two threats, and many other threats that are much less obvious.

At a fundamental level, Cryptyk manages security for data-at-rest (storage), data-in-motion (email/chat/payments) and data-in-use (file-editing/sharing/collaboration). The ecosystem is structured to provide scalable benefits and incentives for all participants to grow the security, integrity, financial competitiveness and performance of Cryptyk ecosystem for all benefits of the Cryptyk Token (and hence all its participants who use or own CTK).

It is a complete security and storage platform that promotes engagement by enterprise customers, individual consumers, financial investors, and third-party app developers. Moreover, the Cryptyk ecosystem is driven by its own cyber-security economy that has just recently launched its own tradable asset called the Cryptyk Token (CTK) on global crypto-currency exchanges. CTK is the financially incentivized gas to drive the construction of a truly open source independent cyber-security ecosystem to fight the $1 Trillion global hacking problem.

By functioning as an ecosystem that removes the profit for hackers and adds to their risk by recording their activity as breadcrumbs on the blockchain, Cryptyk aims to reduce the attack surface for cloud storage down to one user at a time. It has built the first cloud security and storage product that is even immune to attacks from the future quantum computing technology, making it the first completely decentralized cloud security and storage solution in one.

Useful Links

Website: https://www.cryptyk.io
Telegram: https://t.me/cryptykChat
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/TeamCryptyk
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCav90bkU5jx7_oeH12YS2Lw
FacebookL https://www.facebook.com/cryptyk/


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Greetings @hatu

Excellent publication The security of the data in the cloud every day becomes more important, due to the large amount of money lost due to the malicious manipulation of the data.

Like any risk, the best measure of control is to apply solutions at the source of the risk, where the source is the customers. With training and use of special tools, you can control the risks to scams or theft of data.

Training is a part, but at the end it boils down to the tools.

Thanks for the excellent information. As an IT professional, I completely agree of course. I'm also a student of physical security. As you know, physical access means everything. If you can get to the server or computer, you own it.

One of the reasons I became an ASIS board certified Physical Security Professional is because companies and individuals are not taking their physical security seriously either. You can secure your systems all you want, and then poor security will let a hacker walk right into the server room.

Once they are there too, they can do a ton of damage very quickly. The same concept applies to your home as an individual too. Take your physical security seriously whether you own a company building or are just an individual with a rental or house. Make it difficult to steal your valuables in addition to your data.

Physical security has been on people's mind since the dawn of man, right?

Look at the typical residence. Most people are not paying attention to it at all. Most businesses are the same. People don't have a good resource for securing their homes and businesses because the police, fire departments, and locksmith companies don't share the information well.

But locks and alarms are pretty common.

Companies hired for cybersec end up selling vulnerabilities sooner or later without getting caught. It's a for-profit industry.

That's why I decentralized ecosystem is optimal. It's in everyone's interest to improve cybersecurity.

Unless you're a government? ;-)

Haha, let's not go there. 🤫

Companies have to look for cyber security because customers get in trouble due to technical crimes.

Not trouble. They end up in danger.

It's not a scam? Great idea to make internet more secure.
With Internet of things we will go into trouble when hackers could derail train or stop electronics work in electrical station and cause stop generation of electricity.
Also, now a lot of cameras work on default passwords and username from manual - people don't set own pass but connet to intenet.

Cryptyk's been around for a while. As for the IoT aspect, the system is designed to serve as a platform for enhancements that twine with demand.

With the way internet is growing day by day, i doubt if cybercrime can still be ended

Just need the right resources and a collaborative environment.

I work online as an EFL teacher, that is English as a Foreign Language. I'm not going to name the site for which I work, for obvious security reasons.

Yesterday, the site was inaccessible all day long because some asshole(s) were DDoS attacking it. Now, what sort of antisocial wankstain wastes his/her time carrying out a DDoS attack on a language-tutoring website? I am at an utter loss to explain such behaviour, but it was happening, and it cost me a full day's income.

Personally, I don't use any cloud services at all. I won't even allow Steam, (not to be confused with Steem), to store my savegames to its cloud, and that requires actively opting-out, since such cloud saves are enabled by default. And my reason is exactly what you have cited - security.

In the immortal words of Tycho Brahe, (the Penny Arcade guy, not the astronomer), "every avenue of convenience for the user is also a potential vector of attack". This is true because Convenience and Security are opposite ends of a sliding scale. The more convenient something is, the less secure it is, and vice versa.

And so, forgive me please, but I'm skeptical about this Cryptyk platform you are promoting here. The last four paragraphs of your article sound suspiciously like something from somebody's marketing department, full of empty verbiage and unsubstantiated claims.

I have a NAS in my house that I haven't used in years, so it is too far out of date to use again.

In the near future I will be buying and setting up another one. It includes hardware encryption as well. For the last 10 years I've been trusting my data with Google Drive, but I don't trust them anymore and worry about losing access one day. The Synology device I end up buying will automatically back up one way or both ways with Google Drive, DropBox, and Amazon too!

I'm sorry to hear about the DDoS attack against your work website. Such attacks are one reason why I like the Steemit blockchain concept. So many different sites connect to it that you'd have to DDoS or block them all on the DNS level to really shut it down completely. Hopefully governments or hackers would never do that though.

Cryptyk isn't a cloud service provider; it's a security service.

Consider that while you opt out of Steam's cloud storage, the system itself runs on it. In fact, its throughput relay utilizes it too. While you can opt out of some vectors that require cloud service, you cannot opt out of all of them. In many cases, the platform itself relies on the cloud service.

Shunning convenience isn't a good thing or we'd still be on horse buggies. The goal is to adopt the convenience in a secure manner. So, any service that secures the cloud is taking the right step forward.

Not to mention that we are currently in the most vulnerable time for people as Apps have access to all our phone information.

Crime is seen in all the beautiful areas of the world. Cyber ​​crime is not isolated. You have brought the basics right in the discussion. It will be more beneficial than harm. Present the direction further. Everyone knows, this is the hope.

Wow your post has been so helping and motivating and I say so too.. When companies neglec cybersecurity, customers become victims.... Kudos to you

As far as I know, DDOS attack doesnt affect customers directly, its an infrastructure debilitating technique. I just point this out ,as your post is called " [..] customers become victims"

It is nevertheless correct if you consider a customer victim of not being able to make use of a service temporarily.

A response by someone else offers a rebuttal to your thought.
Many people rely on services, which can be impacted by DDoS attacks, for an income. The example given earlier was of an online tutor losing access to the platform due to a DDoS attack and consequently losing a day's income.

...and being highly pissed-off about it. I was wishing a severe case of anal warts on the person(s) responsible.

I didn't just lose a day's income, my reputation on the site was damaged. I had to cancel one reservation, and outright missed another, which led to the site automatically restricting my ability to make reservations in the future.

Remaining unknown helps, as you can see, I def don't have that skill lol

Haha, but staying in the unknown too much can become dangerous.

that's a good point to be explained thank you bro.....

Welcome.

Sometimes some companies blame their victims for being channels for cyber attacks

Posted using Partiko Android

That's awful but I'm pretty sure companies with that sort of mindset lose plenty of business.

The world is evolving into an ever growing state of a globalization environment. One cannot overlook the different factors affecting our daily lives as well as the future of the coming generations

A piece of advice I was given early in life was "to be careful whose advice you accept". In the age of social media, there is no shortage of people offering opinions and few equipped to assess the value of that advice. You are one of the guiding lights in here.

Too kind.

“Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.”-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Waoh .....your post has been so informative ..kudos @hatu

Posted using Partiko Android

Ich hoffe das wir die Cyberkriminalität mit Hilfe der dezentralen Blockchain
verringern können.

That's a mutual hope.

Este es un post muy informativa, de verdad apoyo estos tipos de posto

wow you are n 1

Thank you for your info. Developers need to take their time and not get in a rush to put peoples money and personal info at risk.
Thanks
dubloon135

This was true, i have some experince that affect me. Very informative article!

Congratulations @hatu!
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Hola a todos, espero me sigan y puedan visitar mi blog, al igual que esta valiosa informacion tengo buenas post, aunque soy algo nuevo en esta comunidad confío en que todos pueden ayudarme...
https://steemit.com/@duranramon03

The connection of blockchain and the Internet of Things is on the agenda for many companies and there are existing implementations, solutions and initiatives in several areas and we can read more here; https://medium.com/kucoinexchange/iot-prosperity-is-approaching-on-the-back-of-blockchain-728030a91964