What is Cyber Security?

Cyber Security can be defined as the practice of safeguarding computers, servers, mobile devices, networks, and data from malicious attacks. From an organization's point of view, Cyber Security refers to every aspect of defending an organization, including its employees and other valuable assets against cyber threats. These cyber threats are generally performed by outside attackers, which are known as hackers. The ulterior motive of these hackers is to find vulnerabilities in an organization's computer systems through which they can breach the security wall of the organization and get illegal access to their data and other valuable information.

Cyber Security is a vast field containing several disciplines. They are:

Network Security:

Generally, hackers try to get illegal access to an organization's system via the Internet or any other network. The task of network security is to provide an effective solution to detect and block these attacks.

Cloud Security:

Nowadays, all organizations deploy and host their services on the cloud. Cloud Computing provides modern features which an organization uses for its benefit. Therefore securing the cloud from cyber attackers becomes a major concern. Cloud Security provides strategies, solutions, and policies through which we protect our data on the cloud.

Mobile Security:

Often corporate organizations use smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices to access their data. To secure these devices against threats from malicious apps, phishing, etc, we use mobile security. Mobile Security protects these mobile devices from these attacks and maintains security.

Application Security:

Since web applications are directly connected through the internet, they are the main targets for hackers. Application Security protects these applications and APIs from bot attacks and other malicious interactions.

The CIA Triad

The CIA Triad is a well-known, esteemed model for developing security policies used in identifying problem areas, along with necessary solutions in the arena of information security. The three letters of the CIA stand for Confidentiality, Integrity, and Authentication. The CIA triad is a guiding model of information security. Combined, these three principles form the main pillars of any organization’s security infrastructure. Together, they function as goals and objectives for every security program. The CIA triad is so foundational to information security that anytime data security is breached, a system is attacked, a user takes a phishing bait, an account is hacked, a website is maliciously taken down, or any number of other security incidents occur one or more of these three principles are certainly violated.

Security professionals evaluate the level of threats and vulnerabilities based on the possible impact they could have on the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an organization’s assets namely, its data, applications, and integral systems. Based on that assessment, the security team enforces a set of security controls to reduce risk within the environment. A comprehensive information security strategy is made, that includes policies and measures that minimize threats to these three crucial components.

The CIA triad contains a set of rules and protocols that the information security team of an organization uses, to implement security in their systems. The CIA triad acts as a skeleton for the security principles of an organization. Every security module, that is implemented in an organization's system, must be capable of providing security to these three principles.

The CIA triad guides information security in a broad sense and is also useful for managing the products and data of research.

History of the CIA Triad

Unlike many foundational concepts in infosec, the CIA triad doesn't seem to have a single creator or proponent; rather, it emerged over time as an article of wisdom among information security pros. Ben Miller, a VP at cybersecurity firm Dragos, traces back early mentions of the three components of the triad in a blog post; he thinks the concept of confidentiality in computer science was formalized in a 1976 U.S. Air Force study, and the idea of integrity was laid out in a 1987 paper that recognized that commercial computing, in particular, had specific needs around accounting records that required a focus on data correctness. Availability is a harder one to pin down, but the discussion around the idea rose in prominence in 1988 when the Morris worm, one of the first widespread pieces of malware, knocked a significant portion of the embryonic internet offline.

It's also not entirely clear when the three concepts began to be treated as a three-legged stool. But it seems to have been well established as a foundational concept by 1998, when Donn Parker, in his book Fighting Computer Crime, proposed extending it to a six-element framework called the Parkerian Hexad. (We'll return to the Hexad later in this article.)

Thus, the CIA triad has served as a way for information security professionals to think about what their job entails for more than two decades. The fact that the concept is part of cybersecurity lore and doesn't "belong" to anyone has encouraged many people to elaborate on the concept and implement their interpretations.

It is, however, not clear when the CIA became a triad. The foundational concept seems to have been established by 1998.

Principles of the CIA Triad

Confidentiality

Confidentiality means the state of keeping secrets or not disclosing information. It comes from confide, meaning to trust someone or tell secrets to them. When an organization prevents illegal access by unauthorized users from accessing secret and sensitive information of the organization, a state of confidentiality is said to be achieved. Confidentiality allows only authorized users to access the secret documents and data of the organization. Confidentiality means that only authorized individuals or authorized systems can view sensitive information. The data being sent over the network should not be illegally accessed by unauthorized individuals. The attacker may try to capture the data using different tools available on the Internet and breach your security and privacy. A primary way to avoid this is to use encryption techniques to safeguard your data so that even if the attacker gains access to your data, he/she will not be able to decrypt it. Encryption standards include AES(Advanced Encryption Standard) and DES (Data Encryption Standard). Another way to protect your data is through a VPN tunnel. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and helps the data to move securely over the network.

Integrity

Integrity means data are trustworthy, complete, and have not been accidentally altered or modified by an unauthorized user. Integrity is a term used for complete data, which is available to the authorized users of the organization in its purest form. Whenever an unauthorized user gets illegal access to an organization's sensitive and secret data, he/she can alter, replicate or modify it using various sources. In that case, the data is said to have lost its integrity. The integrity of all the valuable and secret assets of an organization should be well preserved and protected. Integrity helps to preserve the trustworthiness of data by holding it in the right form and being immune to any inappropriate mutation. Countermeasures that protect data integrity comprise encryption, hashing, digital signatures, and digital certificates by trusted certificate authorities (CAs) to organizations to verify their originality to website users, equivalent to the path a passport or driver’s license can be used to verify an individual's identity.

Availability

This is the final component of the CIA Triad and refers to the actual availability of your data. Authentication mechanisms, access channels, and systems all have to work properly for the information they protect and ensure it's available when it is needed. The data and other documents must be available to their respective authorized users of the organization who have the right to access them. Systems, applications, and data are of small worth to an organization and its consumers if they are