What is cybersecurity?
What is Cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity is the protection of your digital assets from online threats. The goal is to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of things like your online identity, finances, devices, and your various online accounts.
Impact of Cyber Attacks
While cybersecurity is about protecting digital assets, the ultimate goal is to ensure you stay safe from threats that can severely impact your everyday life. Cyber attacks can affect your finances, violate private and confidential personal information, and damage your online reputation. These incidents can create unnecessary stress and anxiety, so it’s important to keep your digital assets and online identity safe to prevent an impact on your everyday life.
What are Digital Assets?
Digital assets are your crucial and valuable things that live in the digital realm, such as your online bank accounts, emails, important confidential files, photos, and social media accounts. To identify your digital assets, consider what online items, if lost or deleted, would significantly impact your daily life. Anything you consider having a high impact on your daily life is a critical digital asset.
A common example is losing access to your money. Imagine how severely your life would be impacted if you couldn’t access your money due to a cyber-attack.
High impact = Digital asset
The CIA Triad
The goal of cybersecurity is to ensure the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) of your digital assets.
- Confidentiality: Ensuring your digital assets are accessed only by you and those you authorize.
- Integrity: Ensuring your digital assets are as they are supposed to be and not tainted.
- Availability: Ensuring your digital assets are always accessible.
Defense In Depth
How do we ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of our digital assets? This is achieved through the concept of Defense in Depth. Defense In Depth is the act of implementing multiple layers of security, giving you a diverse defense so that your digital assets have protection on multiple levels.
Think of how a well-defended home is secured against intruders. Are you going to lock just the front door and call it good? No, you're going to ensure every door and window to the exterior is locked. You’ll have door alarms, window alarms, and even cameras for intruder detection. Multiple layers of defense effectively keep intruders away. Like intruders trying to get into your home, hackers look for weaknesses in your digital assets. Therefore, applying defense in depth logic to secure your digital assets is crucial.
No cybersecurity solution is hacker-proof, which is why it’s essential to implement multiple layers of security to make it nearly impossible to breach your digital assets and give you a high level of peace of mind.
Now let's summarize cybersecurity into one simple sentence.
Cybersecurity is about employing defense in depth to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your digital assets to give you peace of mind.
