Digital world growth is like never before whether it’s a corporate world or personal space. In fact, a day starts with online activities for the majority of people and so are the threats and risk of being online. There is a consistent amount of energy that is being used to understand the digital world, uses and exploration. And it won’t be unfair to say that all these are happening without measuring the potential threat and impact of it especially in a case of when a data of press of a button is also getting analysed maybe for financial benefit or giving better user experiences. It doesn’t matter if you are working in the most mature enterprise environment, unemployed, retired or still at school, your online activities are not secure enough.
Securing the digital world is not a straightforward guide for an individual or enterprise users, but understanding and awareness of information security and threats certainly make sense. The purpose of this article is to explain a bit of what social engineering and security concern in the digital edge.
Considering the massive shift in people perception, now no one can even think of staying away from digitization and technology. But the question is how to ensure the most fundamental right of human and organization are protected in the first place. This can be achieved only by - Practicing the responsibilities of self and organization. From the end user point of view, to ensure the digital world is secure, is bit complex since the parameters and stakeholders are globally distributed.
From an industrial point of view, an explosion of smarter and more connected devices is driving the evolution of the digital economy. To be more precise, the current economy is built upon innovation, fueled by information, and powered by the dynamic workforce. To keep pace with the growing demand for increased production, greater efficiency and cost control, organizations are fetching the significant value from technological advancement. But at the same time, an organization also understand the value of measuring the security risk and cost of ignorance.
Most of us agree that security is one major concern but what exactly needs to be secure? The answer is - Data, Pattern, assets and people more importantly.
Data: Currently, the data is more precious than oil. A decade ago, the resource in question was oil. Now a similar amount of concerns are being raised by the giant that deal in data. Take an example of Google, what makes Google so powerful than their competitor - it’s the data they own. Now the question is how Google acquired such an amount of data that make Google stands out, the answer is through their search engine and other applications itself. Looking at the improvement trends in Google application, one can say firmly that day-by-day right from their search engine to other applications, it's more usable and user-centric. Their innovation and user-centric research are extraordinary. Now imagine, if a company using these data for other than user experience! Certainly, the results wouldn’t be in favour of users. Therefore, users need to take a greater amount of caution for their data.
Patterns: This is a concept and realization of the user behaviour model. Users activities generate the proportionate amount of data and an organization has accumulated a huge amount of data. Storing and analyzing data with the machine learning method have become the best way to discover the pattern and insights from data. The patterns of usability in the digital world is one of the very important footprints of users and that differentiate him/her from others. Behaviour models are the foundation of AI experiments, individual and, an organization must take utmost care to protect the user's patterns.
Asset: Security issues have financial implications. Thousands of users on daily basis losing their hard earned money in this digital world. The recent GDPR regulations is a historic step to ensure safe and proper handling of European Union citizen’s personal data or a risk to fine up to 4% of company gross annual revenue. This legislation provides an opportunity to increase ethical considerations in the technological platform development in general where organizations can go beyond compliance and reframe innovation to probably align their products and services with end-user value. Every country should have similar regulations to ensure its citizen’s data in the first place.
People: They are the most vulnerable in this digital world. Right from their identity to their emotional and mental state, have an inevitable threat. The risks vary from minor annoyance to sizable devastation. Increasingly use of technology has made people dysfunctional from a mental, personal and social perspective. The impact that makes on a human is nothing but the uses of technology and content or precisely fabricated content. In some sense, currently, unimaginable damage is happening because they can’t even think and act properly.
Advancements in information technology raised increasingly complex issues associated with the protection and sharing of personal information. Characterizing a single unifying theory of privacy is hard because users data privacy is related to the economic relevance of respective publishing companies. Software publishing companies need to understand the theoretical and empirical situation where the protection of privacy can both enhance individual and societal welfare. At the end of the day, in the digital world, users ability to make informed decisions about their data privacy is severely hindered, because users are often in a position of imperfect or asymmetric information regarding when their data is collected, for what purpose, and with what consequences.
Each one of us has an opportunity to drive meaningful change today and develop a foundation of trust for tomorrow’s digital world. Individual and an organization together can participate in and develop much-needed guidelines and oversight mechanisms. Software development companies should embrace and develop technologies that can advance their businesses and enhance digital safety to ensure a better world.