Page 47 - Cyber Defense eMagazine December 2022 Edition

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late last month which totalled over £90 million in damages. Cyber actors have no remorse; therefore, it
is crucial that organisations keep their cybersecurity up to date, especially when lives could potentially
be on the line.

Similarly for telcos, the UK government has begun cracking down on employing cybersecurity rules
across all mobile and broadband providers. In an effort to protect Britain’s broadband and mobile
networks from potential threats, CSPs need to be more vigilant in their cybersecurity, or else risk fines of
up to £100,000 per day should they fail to comply. With governments realising the importance of investing
in modern technology for data protection, businesses across all sectors can benefit from updating their
systems, or else risking a healthy pay-out.

It is predicted that, by 2025, cyber-crimes could cost over £9 trillion annually across the world. This
estimation is based on growing figures, including factors such as the damage and destruction of data,
theft of intellectual and financial property, and also post-attack disruption of business and reputational
harm. In the UK alone, Ramsac reported that costs could reach £27 billion annually across all sectors.
Organisations must start prioritising identifying and preventing complex cyber-attacks before they occur
– something that is impossible if remaining with a legacy system.

Challenges with the legacy software

For businesses relying on traditional reactive security monitoring software (such as with legacy SIEM
solutions), they have access to basic analysis and aggregation of log data for detecting cyber incidents.
Unfortunately, this can be limited, as most solutions only focus on the alert mechanisms to trigger once
a previously known attack pattern has transpired. With the dynamically changing threat landscape, a
legacy system often does not offer enough organisation-wide visibility and scalability to truly prevent
attacks should they occur.

Cyber criminals have access to the best software available, meaning even the most advanced security
software can be bypassed. Criminals are able to hide their activity in the hundreds of gigabytes of data
collected from various log sources, as legacy systems do not have the capacity to learn and differentiate
them from common user behaviour. When alerts are triggered, these also often are false positives,
leading to actual threats slipping through the cracks and going ignored entirely.

Updating legacy systems is therefore imperative. Investing in modern technologies such as cloud-based
artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based threat detection can help IT managers and
security operations center (SOC) analysts to be far more proactive in monitoring and preventing any
cyber threats, by automatically predicting the behaviour of highly complex healthcare IT networks and
systems.

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