Cyber crime is gaining pace with the increasing threats due to online frauds and unethical hacking. According to the survey conducted for MeriTalk’s, government IT leaders recently gave an insight into how advanced analytics can help improve network security and predict criminal behavior to provide effective risk management. These IT leaders focused their attention on growth of big data analytics to ensure optimum cyber security and development of innovative tools to combat cyber security threats.
Big data analytics may be the key to fighting cyber crime. Using big data to combat cyber crime, is becoming a decisive strategy for businesses willing to stay secure. With security risks becoming larger, from structured and unstructured data inside the network servers to smart phones, businesses need to be extremely alert due to tremendous increase in cyber threats. Several organizations are leveraging big data analytics for supporting their business processes. However, there are only few organizations that have realized the potential benefits of analytics towards ensuring information security.
Online frauds in the form of phishing and pharming are becoming common. In Phishing, the hacker fraudulently presents oneself online as a trusted authority to trick consumers into giving their personal financial information for identity theft. It is usually perpetuated using mass distributions of e-mails. Pharming is an activity that takes advantage of the vulnerability in Domain Name Service (DNS) server software allowing a hacker to redirect a website’s traffic to another web site.
With both information and cyber safety threat increasing, organizations must be ready to equip themselves with predicting and preventing cyber crime. Cyber criminals are using misrepresented or hacked information for their commercial gains. The growing complexity of cyber crimes, requires deep technical expertise and jurisdictional investigations to be solved. Big data along with information security is arising both challenges and opportunities. Big data analytics is enabling companies to analyze voluminous amount of data they gather during financial transactions, any locale-specific data and others as well. Fighting cyber crime is of utmost importance today due to increased risk of cyber theft.
Big data tools are being used to fight cyber attacks. Cyber crime experts are leveraging big data tools to identify the potential threats and prevent cyber crime incidents. Organizations need not go into complexities of how these cyber-attacks are carried out from an in-depth technical perspective. However, they must concentrate their energies to understand how the attacks break their defense systems. Fighting Cyber crime with actionable insights and data analytics can lead to enhanced information security capabilities. Improved cyber security resilience and reduced business impact is vital as it replaces the idea of reacting to security breaches with requirement process of anticipating the potential risks, evaluating them, and responding in a desired manner.
According to a recent survey conducted interviewing IT professionals from different government departments including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, NASA and others, it was found out that analytics empowers agencies to understand overall information infrastructure in a better way. Therefore, they can understand their security environment as well. The report suggested that companies can create a comprehensive information architecture strategy incorporating both big data and cyber security. Companies need to assess the risks and subsequently invest in analytics tools for preventing against cyber crime.
Screen scraping is being carried out by hackers to steal the information that a person has posted on their website or social networking site. Hackers are using this information to break into user account and steal passwords for committing fraud including identity theft. When organizations decide to crawl information, it may help in identifying cyber criminals by collecting information from different social networking and other websites. Several security breach incidents are happening around the world using highly sophisticated set of tools. Some recent ones include credit card data breaches at Target, Neiman Marcus, and many other retailers across the globe. In another incident, data of almost 8,000 people was hacked in a cyber-attack on Ashmolean website.
Data Analysis for Cyber Crime
Data Analysts for cyber crime prevention may use raw data that may not be private in nature. But, the outcome of analytics exercise creates sensitive information that needs to be protected. Using personal identifiable information is a matter of high level of legal significance as per the data privacy laws. Big data analytics is helping in establishing cyber crime security by helping in identifying cyber criminals. Current malware attacks are successful even against highly up-to-date anti-malware software. To counter this, vendors are leveraging big data analytics to investigate malware reports and mitigate malware campaigns. In this case, the attackers had installed malware on Point of Sale (PoS) systems at different retail locations throughout the country.
The speed at which business data is growing or getting transformed is tremendous. Big data scientists and analysts need to meticulously analyze the data security risks from different data sources. Insights from Big data analytics help to manage different types of risks in cyber world. Big data is emerging as a decisive strategy for security as the risks are getting bigger now. Today, common users are perturbed with enormous data collection, data sharing and data usage. A better understanding and engagement is required with the implementation of specific guidelines and best practices on data usage, storage and transmission.
Law-making process is a slow affair, keeping in mind the speed at which technology is changing. This means new technological remedies remain inhibited by outdated laws. However, big data is relatively new for its entailments to be understood in an in-depth manner and tackled by suitable laws and regulations. Organizations must ensure apt usage of big data analytics in accordance with existing legislations and regulations for optimum benefits in checking cyber crime.
