Happy Safer Internet Day

The Internet has been an amazing invention that has undoubtedly change the world in more ways than we can think of.

Safer Internet Day is celebrated today each year to promote the safe and positive use of digital technology for children and young people and inspire a national conversation.

Redickaa Subrammanian, Founder and CEO, Resulticks, quoted: "As we embrace a digital world with a burgeoning digitally connected population, the need to maintain the security of our personal, social, corporate and financial lives online raises prominence. While it is the responsibility of each individual to adopt safe internet usage practices, the organizations that they are engaging with have an equal amount of accountability as well.

Today, data breaches in organizations are making headlines regularly. Organizations cannot afford security lapses especially considering the high volumes of critical customer data they access to derive crucial insights and decisions. To strengthen their security architecture, organizations need to adopt a multi-layered approach to security and privacy that employs data encryption, creates secure databases and puts in place provisions for authorized access. At Resulticks, we have a hybrid deployment model which hosts PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data on-premises while ensuring access to the full benefits of a marketing cloud. The solution only picks up necessary contact information for targeting at the time of delivery and triggers the communications on-premises, preventing the leak of sensitive data. By integrating diverse security measures and privacy policies, organizations can offer powerful data protection and regulatory compliance, making the internet safer for all customers.”

Fortinet advises organizations to adopt a layered approach to ‘Make TheInternet Safer’

Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India & SAARC, Fortinet, added: “Cybersecurity remains a primary concern for all organizations, and cybersecurity awareness needs to be part of any successful strategy to keep networks and data safe. Safer Internet Day is a global initiative to build an industry awareness campaign that can change the overall user culture of an organization by creating a Cyber-Aware Workforce. Anyone and everyone can play a role to spread the message of Safer Internet Practices to make the cyber world a safer and better place for all.”

Organizations should implement a layered approach to security across people, processes, and technologyto future-proof and manage these risks:

Train People – The vast majority of attacks still happen because someone clicks on a malicious link. Employees need to be continually educated on creating strong passwords, how to identify malicious URLs and email sources, and to not open or click on unfamiliar or unexpected email messages, links, or attachments. This should then be augmented with access management policies, including a zero trust policy, and intent-based segmentation so in the event of an incident, an attack is limited to a specific segment of the network.

Implement Processes – Incident response plans need to include regular backups that are stored off-network, regular testing of those backups, and system restoration drills to ensure everyone knows their role so systems can be restored as quickly as possible.

IT teams must always know what assets are online, where those assets are, and then be able to prioritize their access to and consumption of resources based on which are most business-critical.

Deploy Technology – Security tools need to be chosen based on their ability to be integrated together and cross-automated so they can gather, share, correlate, and consume threat intelligence across the entire distributed network in real time.

There is no magic pill to make the Internet Safer. It requires constant user education and awareness creation. Campaigns can be focused specifically on a training initiative such as cybersecurity awareness, or could be larger campaigns that are well aligned with your learning objectives. They can be internal campaigns or external campaigns that typically provide a significant number of resources and support. An industry awareness like Safer Internet Day can be a great vehicle to launch or expand a cybersecurity awareness campaign.