Security, security, security, we hear it all the time, but why has it moved to the forefront more than it has in the past? I wanted to take an opportunity in this post to dive a little bit deeper into the reasons that so many countermeasures are required these days to protect systems and PC’s from attack. The threat landscape of the individuals and groups on the attack has changed quite drastically in the last 5-10 years.
In the late 1990’s and the early 2000’s, the attackers were mostly what we would refer to as “script kiddies”, basically teenagers with too much time on their hands. A lot of them were interested in learning programming code and knew they were causing damage but it wasn’t necessarily for ideological or financial motives.
In recent years we have seen a shift to the attackers being mostly rogue organizations or those looking for financial gain. These groups or individuals are looking for data that can either threaten the national security of a country or to gain information such as credit card or social security numbers that they can either use themselves or sell. Another difference we see here is that these groups are also usually very well-funded and often have teams of people working to gather the data that they are trying to obtain.
The technology landscape has also changed in recent years and will continue to try to adapt. Currently numerous security tools are often used to have “defense in depth” but there is hope that the base operating systems, such as Windows, will soon be more secure in the way they function at a basic level severely limiting the methods attackers have to take over an operating system. The security tools also are evolving to become less impactful to the end user and eventually will have little to no impact on the work that a person does on their PC.
While there are some growing pains and at times some struggles with the measures that are put in place to reduce security threats there is hope for the future of these technologies.
All Arc, All the Time 