What Are the 12 Pillars of Cybersecurity?

March 1, 2020
Steve Rogers

Cyber-crime is Big Business

Forbes magazine projects that cyber-crime costs will reach $2 Trillion by 2019. That is up from $400-$500 billion in 2015, a quadrupling.

Turn on the news. Frequently, you will hear or read about a new major cybersecurity attack. Not surprisingly, these attacks have a devastating impact on a major business or government entity. Here are a few examples:

Puerto Rico Gov Hit By $2.6M Phishing Scam (January 2020, $2.6 Million)
Government employee fooled by phishing email into wiring $2.6 million dollar payment to cyber criminal’s fraudulent bank account.
U.S. Pipeline Disrupted by Ransomware Attack (December 2019, Cost: Unknown)
Attack caused 2-day shutdown of natural gas pipeline. As a result, ripple effects caused other gas pipelines to shut down.
City of Baltimore Ransomware Attack (May 2019, Cost: $18 Million)
The city refused to pay the ransom. However, they still had to spend an estimated $18 Million to recover from the attack. Consequently, the city was unable to provide critical services to citizens for two weeks.
“Robinhood” Ransomware attack in Greenville NC (April 2019, Cost: Unknown)
Ransomware forced shutdown of Greenville’s entire computer network. Similar to Baltimore, they also refused to pay the ransom, and recovery took over two weeks causing disruption in city services.

12 Pillars of Cybersecurity

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be writing about the 12 Pillars of Cybersecurity. What are the 12 pillars, you might ask? In the past, most companies protected their internal networks with anti-virus software. Then, they added a firewall as they connected their companies to the internet. Those were and are the first two pillars of protection against cybersecurity threats. Later, as businesses implemented e-mail, cyber criminals discovered spam. As a result, anti-spam software was deployed. That is the third pillar.

The problem is that there is too much money to be made by cybercriminals. Consequently, they evolve more sophisticated ways to attack your network to steal your identity and your money. To sum it up, those three pillars are no longer enough to protect your business from a cyber-attack. Aktion believes that to truly protect your company, you need to implement a ‘defense in depth’ strategy. Use the 12 Pillars of Cybersecurity to guide your strategy.

[Stay Tuned-More to Come on Each of the 12 Pillars]

For more information on cybersecurity, try these links: