If technology has made our lives easy, wherein we can have everything done at the click of a mouse or a button on our mobile phones, it has also made us vulnerable to exposing our sensitive data on a public platform.

As a result, personally identifiable information, protected health information, intellectual property, personal information, government and industry information are under threat every minute. Industries may lose valuable data due to cyber attacks that disrupt their systems. Personal attacks by cybercriminals are no longer news. And despite security measures in place, cyberattacks are still rampant. When it comes to the government, its decisions, policies, and functioning, the entire country’s security comes under threat. Economies can collapse besides security.

At the onset of cybercrime, they rightly said that the following and more severe form of terrorism would be cyber terrorism. Well, the rest is history. Unauthorised access to data has become the most serious concern among users of the Internet.

With the number of users, devices, and programs increasing by the day, the number, intensity, and attack techniques of intellectual cyber attackers are also on the rise. This compounds the problem and its severity even further.

Malware, ransomware, social engineering, phishing, spear phishing, insider threats, distributed denial of service, advanced persistent threats, man-in-the-middle attacks, cross-site scripting attacks, SQL, business email compromise, and many other forms of cyber security threats are evolving on a day-to-day basis. The cyber threat landscape continues to grow.

To combat such grave threats, cyber security companies have come to the rescue. Yet, maintaining cyber security is a challenge for organisations and governments since cyber attackers are constantly improvising ways and means to continue with their malicious plans. The challenge is bigger for cyber security companies to outsmart the attackers.

Many industries have started giving cyber security training to their employees to help them understand and avoid risks and the steps they should take to troubleshoot an issue. Often, there are pop-ups of free/paid workshops on cyber security on our social media platforms. These explain the seriousness and the frequency of cyberattacks.

That we are living in times of cyber terrorism is brought to our living rooms every day by the media. Here is where the need for cyber security companies becomes vital. Several cyber security companies are coming up with innovative programs to protect the data of individuals, companies, and governments.

Automation is one of the effective ways to secure a company’s data. Even as this edition goes for print, many cyber attackers could probably be scheming new attack moves. But fortunately, we have cyber security companies inventing better ways to not only protect our data and but also prevent attacks.

In our latest edition of CIOLook, Best Performing Cyber Security Companies, we have featured some companies that have established themselves in the cyber security landscape through reliable ways to protect our data. And they are still inventing and re-inventing their programs. We are sure you will enjoy reading this edition as much as we did while curating it.

Have an interesting read!

• Sumita Sarkar