How to keep your online data secure? Know the top 5 cybersecurity software

In today’s digital world, sensitive information and financial data are often stored and transmitted online. Cybersecurity helps prevent data from unauthorised access, theft and misuse. Cyber attacks can range from hacking and phishing to malware and ransomware attacks.

Effective cybersecurity measures can stop such attacks and prevent an individual or an organisation from personal and financial loss, reputational damage, and even physical losses.

Firewalls

A firewall is considered to be the most important security tool as it is the core of security tools. It helps prevent unauthorised access to or from a private network. It shields devices from malware, viruses and hacking attempts. It can be implemented on devices as both software and hardware. All the messages and content entering or leaving the intranet passes through the firewall. Each message and content is examined by a firewall and those who don’t meet the specified security criteria are blocked. 

Some of the examples of firewall software are FortiGate NGFW, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall, ZoneAlarm, Glasswire Firewall and many more.

Antivirus software

Antivirus software is another must programme created for cyber defence. It is designed to prevent, detect, and remove virus and malware attacks, as well as to keep a check on an individual computer, network, and its systems from a variety of threats and viruses such as Trojan viruses, rootkits, keyloggers, spyware and ransomware.

Further, antivirus software also help prevent attacks from emails containing malicious links and attachments by keeping a check on them regularly. Norton AntiVirus, Kapersky Anti-Virus, Bitdefender Antivirus, and McAfee Total Protection are some of the examples of antivirus software.

Public key infrastructure services

The public key infrastructure, also known as PKI is the set of hardware, software, policies, processes, and procedures necessay to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates and public-keys.

They help computer systems to securely exchange data over the internet and verify the data of other parties. PKI assures authentication of the other party. Further, it enables multi-factor authentication and access controls by creating trusted digital signatures.

Managed detection and response service

Managed detection and response (MDR) is a category of a Security-as-a-Service offering, where an business outsources some of its security operations to a third-party provider. Apart from simply detecting threats, these services actually work to remediate them on an organisation’s network.

Further, it provides advanced security that includes threat hunting, threat intelligence, security monitoring, incident analysis, and incident response. MDR also uses AI machine learning to investigate potential threats on the system.  

Few MDR service providers Cynet, SecurityHQ, Security Joes, and Cybereason, etc.

Penetration testing

Penetration test evaluates the security of the system by safely exploiting the vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities exist in operating systems, services, and applications. 

Here, cybersecurity professionals use the same techniques and processes used by hackers to find out possible potential threats, loopholes, and areas of weakness. The attacks are real-world simulations on a network and application. Once the test has taken place, the testers present us with their findings and recommend potential changes to our system. 

Few examples of penetration testing tools include Metasploit, Kali Linux, Netsparker, and Wireshark.