As the international Data Privacy Day is approaching, this made me think where we stand in 2019.
The cybersecurity industry is changing fast, as new technologies are continually appearing.
However, to stay competitive, the cyber underground is also evolving at an alarming rate. From crypto jacking to attacks against voice-powered devices, new types of cybercrimes dominated 2018.
And, small businesses are among the most common hacker attack victims.
And, the consequences of getting your company data stolen are multiple. One of them lies in the fact that every data breach costs you lots of your hard-earned money. From the disruption of everyday business operations to data recovery processes, cyber attacks will require small businesses over 2 trillion in 2019.
So, what steps to take to prevent data breaches and protect your sensitive information?
Have a Strong Privacy Policy and Educate your Employees
Employee negligence may compromise your company’s data security. It’s enough for an employee to open a phishing email or connect to an unsecured wi-fi and, voila, your data gets stolen.
In this scenario, investing in high-end cybersecurity solutions means nothing. If you want to take your data security to the next level, you first need to educate your employees.
There are two significant steps to take.
First, the majority of your employees are using their devices at work. And, banning them for using their phones may sound like an obvious option, but it seldom works in the long-run. So, instead of making such drastic moves that may hurt your employee relationships, you should focus on educating them.
To help you minimize the risks of cybercrime, your employees need to be aware of how serious this problem is. Focus on explaining what unsecured networks are and how do avoid them on both their work devices and personal devices. Most importantly, teach them about the different types of cybercrime they may face, explain how much these attacks cost your business, and highlight some necessary preventive measures.
For example, show them what types of sites they should avoid and what links or documents they shouldn’t open. As most of them spend their spare time on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you should also explain what social media botnet accounts are and why they should avoid accepting friend requests from the people they don’t know.
Second, build a stable cybersecurity policy. Just like its mere name says, this is a comprehensive document containing clear guidelines for your employees on how to share and consume online data to protect data privacy. These guidelines need to be written in a simple and easy-to-understand language. Additionally, they need to contain a set of rules on how an employee should behave to avoid a data breach, as well as what immediate steps to take when the hack occurs.
Invest in a Solid Anti-Malware and Firewall Software & Hardware
In 2018, we saw the explosion of new cyber attacks.
Malware is still the most dominant form of cybercrime. Crypto mining attacks gained greater popularity. They have risen by almost 1000%.
Cyber attacks have also become more complex. They’re now in a cluster in a series of individual attacks that work cohesively and aim to attack the different components of your business’ network.
IoT devices are also considered the next prominent victim of cybercriminals in 2019. Some popular botnets like Mirai or IoT Reaper have already demonstrated how harmful infecting connected devices can be. For example, by infecting your business tablet, a hacker can crack your password, manage your business devices, and steal your data without even getting noticed. Your security software sees the tablet they hacked as a trusted device, and the commands are coming directly from it won’t seem suspicious.
This is why you need to up your cybersecurity efforts and opt for those software solutions that can give you a full insight into your performance.
Now, many anti-virus software pieces you can find on the market are not effective against the latest types of hacker attacks. As they are explicitly designed to work in the background, they will probably be detected once your systems are already infected and it’s too late to save your data.
Precisely because of that, you need to turn to solutions that are designed with greater convenience and responsibility in mind. The firewall appliance you choose needs to identify different types of threats and isolate them on time, preventing them from attacking your systems. Most importantly, these types of internet security solutions need to be easy to understand and operate, provide real-time detection and immediate response, and offer greater security visibility.
Always Encrypt and Backup your Data
Any significant cybersecurity strategy should contain two key aspects.
First, you need to invest in solid firewall hardware that will prevent cybercriminals from accessing your data.
Second, if the hack occurs and they manage to steal your vital corporate information, you need to render this information useless.
This is where data encryption steps in. Namely, by encrypting sensitive data, such as your customers’ personally identifiable information or your employee data, you will ensure that the hacker cannot use them even if they fetch them. All you need to do is invest in a reliable encryption software that can work on all your business devices and encrypt your vital data. Additionally, always make sure that the software is still activated and updated regularly on all your business devices.
In addition to encryption, backing up your business data is another immensely vital step to take. Namely, by backing up your data and storing it separately either locally on in the cloud, you will ensure your business’ continuity after getting hacked.
Perform Penetration Testing Regularly
Understanding your business’ specific needs and problems and knowing how to solve them is the basis of your cybersecurity strategy.
That’s precisely why you need to invest in penetration testing. In layman’s terms, penetration testing is the practice hackers use to detect the significant vulnerabilities in your security systems and use them to sneak in and steal your data. The good thing is that you can do the same thing to identify the high-risk aspects of your cybersecurity strategy and focus on addressing them fast.
There are numerous powerful penetration testing tools you can find at different price ranges, including Nmap, Acunetix, or Nessus. Remember, sometimes, stepping in the shoes of your enemies is the only way to beat them.
Over to You
Many businesses still don’t understand the importance of cybersecurity and consider it an additional investment. And, hackers are aware of that. They will use your lack of knowledge and equipment to identify the main vulnerabilities in your business systems and use them to steal your company’s sensitive information.
This is why you need to observe your cyberdefense strategy strategically, and I hope these tips will serve as a solid starting point.
Bug Bounty program and bug bounty hunters are the names which we can hear a lot of times these days. Actually, this is a deal that is provided by a lot of websites and the software developers to all those individuals who will hunt the bugs in their website and inform the respective organization. By doing this bug hunting the individuals can earn recognization and the compensation for reporting the bugs.
If you have decided to be a Bug hunter or a security researcher and don’t know what is bug bounty and how to start where to start.
To know in deep about it read the whole blog.
What is bug bounty hunting?
Anyone who has high curiosity with the high rate computer skills can become a very successful glitch or bug finder. Whatever your age maybe you can be a bug bounty hunter. The important thing is that you have to continuously keep on learning and keep checking for the bugs on different websites.
All these relevant bug findings in the websites will earn you a lot of compensation and also recognization. Maybe you can take up as a full-time job and searching for bugs in the websites.
What does the bug bounty program mean?
The other name of the bug bounty program is Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) is an initiative taken as crowdsourcing. It rewards all those individuals who discover and report about the bug. These type of bug bounty programs are often used by the companies to supplement in-depth and inner code audits and the penetration tests all in as a part of VRP or Bug bounty program.
While you can find many software vendors with a website are running the bug bounty programs and doing the bug hunting. They collaborate with the bug hunters and find the glitches later if anyone finds any bug in the organization. The ethical hackers may some time get exploited if they reported about the software glitches.
How much do bug bounty hunters make?
The bug bounty hunters usually make decent earnings from finding the bugs. The ethical hackers or the bug finders normally earn 3 times more than the regular software developers. However, in some places of the world such as India, it earning of a Bug hunter is 16 times more than that of a normal software person.
When coming to the US the median is not too much as such as India in the US it is 2.5 times more than that of a software developer. The payment differs for the countries because it has been calculated on the basis of salary that people get in both countries.
This means the income of an average software developer in India is less than that of income of an average software developer in the US. While coming to the Bug Bunty Hunters payment it depends on the company or the organization whose bugs they traced, and they get paid according to the company norms.
How to become a Bug Hunter?
If you want to be a bug hunter and doesn’t know how to plan and start in the Bug Bounty program, then follow our guide.
STEP-1 Start reading
Reading is a most not just in Bug tracking even if you chose any field for work, reading is a must for it. There are books on ethical hacking and bug hunting that you buy to learn the basics and the primary things which will help penetration testing and bug finding. It always adviced that you keep you 100% focus on that area of hacking which excites you and creates interest.
Find out that one exact area and pick up all the things that you find and go on to further in a similar way and be an ultimate hacker. Even the greatest hackers have their area of interest and they also don’t know every area of hacking. Below we mention some book that you read to become a good hacker:
The Web Application hacker’s handbook: If you want to be an efficient hacker then reading this book is a most. It is like the Bible for the Bug Hunters. Written by Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto. You can find this book online in Amazon.com.
Always keep your self updated with new technologies and advancements. It is vital to make sure that whatever you read and learn you understand it and most significantly you should check that you are retaining. Practicing on the more vulnerable websites and desktop is a very good way to recall everything.
Penetration testing lab: This is a very good site which will help you in practicing hacking. It contains a list of practicing apps and systems with various scenarios that will help you to become diverse. Once you reach here after that you can find much more new and good sites that will help in ethical hacking.
STEP-3 Watch YouTube videos and read tech reports with Proof Of Concepts
Eventually, you have made your foundation with a strong hold on the basics of Bug Hunting. As you know how to find the defective sites and desktops you are good to go with checking out what all the other hackers are doing.
YouTube is such a place where you can find several videos related because this is a community where people upload videos generously and don’t back out from sharing knowledge. Below we mention some write-ups and video channels:
There are a lot of groups and communities of the bug hunters that you can find on the social media platforms. However, there is one global community of all the hackers it has more than 29,000 hackers.
Joining these communities is important many of the top hackers are present here and are very happy to share their knowledge with a group or the people. It is very beneficiary for any budding hacker to know the tricks and tips. You take a look at some of the communities.
White hat hackers: It is one of the biggest community for the hackers that you can find Twitter.
STEP-5 Know more about Bug Bounties
Now you are almost reaching your destination that is bug hunting. Before directly jumping into bug hunting it is crucial to know how the Bug bounty works? where should you start? All these things because to assure that you get long term success. You should even know all the privacy policy terms of the respective organization before jumping.
Follow Github it will make you understand everything in brief about Bug Bounty and how to start and target.
STEP-6 Now you a Bug Hunter
Here comes the end, you are done with all the background research and reading then you can also start doing ethical hacking and can earn recognition as well as compensation at the same time.
But, never ever forget to keep yourself updated with new technological advancements. When you start never at a time jump on the big organization hacking it is better to go for some smaller one first then to the bigger organization.
If you go the websites such as Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and all then the amateurs may end up getting mad and frustrated. Because these companies have a lot of users and known widely which increases the security for these applications as it a public platform. Kudos! for being an ethical hacker.
Drawbacks: It doesn’t include the present acquisitions like the company web infrastructure, the third party products or the McAfee related details.
Minimum Compensation: Intel offers a minimum amount of the US $500 for detecting the bugs.
Maximum Compensation: While the company pays a maximum amount of $30,000 for detecting the most critical bugs.
Yahoo
It is Good news for the hackers that Yahoo has a full dedicated team who accepts the glitches found by the Bug Hunters.
Drawbacks: While the bad news is Yahoo doesn’t pay anything for finding the glitches in yahoo.net, Yahoo 7, Yahoo Japan, Onwander and all the Yahoo accessed WordPress sites.
Minimum Compensation: There is no minimum compensation in Yahoo.
Maximum Compensation: There is a limit for Yahoo Compensation which is approximately $15,000 for Bug hunting in their system.
Snapchat
Even Snapchat has a team of Vulnerability checking professionals, who review all the bugs report and then act accordingly. The Company acknowledges your report within the time period of 30 days.
Minimum Compensation: You can anticipate high here because Snapchat pays a whopping $2000 for bug reporting as a minimum price.
Maximum Compensation: The maximum reward that you will get in Snapchat is $15,000.
Minimum Compensation: the least payment in Dropbox is $12,167.
Maximum Compensation: The maximum reward here is $32,768.
Apple
However, when Apple first released the Bug Bounty Program it just allowed 46 hackers to do the research. But, now it is open for everyone who wants to try their luck in bug hunting in the Apple system.
Apple Bug Bounty Program even announced that it will reward $100,000 to those who will extract data from Apple Secure Enclave Technology.
Minimum Compensation: There is no fixed limit.
Maximum Compensation: $200,000 is was the highest amount given to a Bug Hunter.
Facebook
For Facebook Bug Bounty Program any ethical hacker can report the bugs directly to Facebook about Instagram, WhatsApp, and Atlas.
Drawbacks: There are already a few glitches on Facebook which they consider it to outbound issues.
Minimum Compensation: $500 for undisclosed problems.
Maximum Compensation: No limit and no maximum compensation.
All the Ethical Hackers and the Bug Detectors are given free hand to find all the issues in the Mozilla Bug Bounty Program.
Drawbacks: This access is only for bugs in Mozilla services that include Firefox, Thunderbird and related services.
Minimum Compensation: Least amount is $500 given by Firefox
Maximum Compensation: $5000
CONCLUSION
Now are good to go, as you find the top companies and how much compensation they are offering if you find out the glitches in their application and systems.
Even you get to know more about how you can become an ethical hacker or a Bug Bounty Hunter.
If you have any queries regarding it please comment below.