During the World Economic Forum 2023, a discussion on cyber threats emerged among leaders from different nations. During the debate, participants reached an alarming conclusion: 86% of leaders believe a significant cyber catastrophe can happen soon if cybersecurity measures are not applied.
This agreement is even higher among professionals involved in cybersecurity, with 93% of them sharing the same opinion.
Do you know what cybersecurity is and how it works? Keep reading further.
What is cybersecurity
Generally speaking, cybersecurity refers to the range of practices used to protect systems and prevent intrusions. Be it theft of personal data such as passwords, credit card numbers, and documents or hacking into systems to defraud banking transactions.
Cybersecurity has a set of practices and technologies to keep you and your systems safe.
Why is cybersecurity so crucial
According to the BugHunt National Information Security Survey, one company out of four in Brazil is the victim of at least one cyberattack per year. This data highlights the frequency with which national companies suffer losses due to these criminal practices.
Therefore, using preventive practices that drastically reduce and mitigate the consequences of these attacks is extremely important. And that is where cybersecurity comes in.
How does cybersecurity work
Overall, it takes good planning of security policies and measures to protect sensitive data. An effective way to plan for this is to understand the most common forms of intrusion and defend against them.
Penetration tests, for example, are used to get into the system to find existing security flaws and then fix them.
However, most system intrusions occur due to human failures, either by sharing passwords or improperly allowing access to unauthorized people.
Even so, technology involved with cybersecurity continues to evolve, and today it can even prevent cases of human failure.
Technologies that have changed cybersecurity
Biometrics
The use of biometrics to identify people has been around for centuries. Since the dawn of humankind, there have been reports of handcrafted items where fingerprints in clay appear as a form of signature.
The same concept can now be applied to recognize a user or employee accessing restricted content or sensitive data, whether by analyzing their fingerprints or unique facial features, such as the distance between the eyes and the size of the lips and nose.
Artificial Intelligence
The possibility of automating activities previously performed manually is a great advantage when it comes to cybersecurity, especially when combined with biometrics.
As a result, it is possible to analyze an individual's biometric data compared to previously registered data and identify whether they belong to the same person.
This combination allows us to use several strategies that increase our security even more:
- Replace passwords: using biometric recognition, its physical characteristics, as they are unique, make the use of passwords obsolete when releasing access to the digital environment, with the benefit of getting rid of the headache that is recovering a forgotten password.
- Remote certification: as most mobile devices currently have a camera, it is possible to perform these biometric operations from home, either as a user or as an employee working remotely.
In addition, it allows the implementation of this technology without the additional expense of biometrics capture devices.
- Optimizing: Since these are automated, these operations are performed in a matter of seconds, which speeds up the process compared to the manual verification method and avoids the possibility of human error.
How and why to invest in cybersecurity
By this point, it is clear that cybersecurity is crucial in modern times and should be a priority to protect your customers' and employees' data and prevent losses.
One of the best ways to immediately strengthen your cybersecurity is using a robust system that includes automatic biometric identification.
While this may sound like a complex and hard-to-access technology, it's the opposite. You can implement complete turnkey systems quickly and inexpensively.
There are ready-to-use APIs and SDKs on the market that cost just a few cents per operation. You can boost the security of your business with quick implementation of fingerprint, face, and even a quality check of the captures.
As you learn more about cybersecurity, you can also read how to avoid fraud using biometrics on our blog.
