The Importance of Digital Security
Just as you may put heirloom jewelry in a safe or keep the title to your home in a secure deposit box, digital security provides an extra layer of protection to protect your data and online accounts. This is especially important for people at risk of surveillance, hacking and phishing threats.
Digital security involves implementing a holistic approach to cybersecurity that includes advanced technical measures, rigorous governance and proactive risk management. This comprehensive strategy is essential to defending against sophisticated and persistent threat actors.
A good example of digital security is Zero Trust, a set of evolving cybersecurity processes that verify device and system transactions as trustworthy before granting access. This prevents unauthorized access to private information or systems, including corporate networks and cloud services. It also enforces minimum privilege on employee devices, which limits their ability to access sensitive information or critical applications and reduces the risk of insider attacks.
Another example of digital security is data aggregation, which involves collecting and combining data to create detailed profiles of individuals or organizations. These can be used to predict behavior, target attacks or justify surveillance and repression. For instance, an authoritarian regime might combine public social media activity, leaked databases and travel records to map the network of a community organizer. Disinformation is also a common digital security threat, in which false or misleading information is spread to confuse and discredit an audience. This can be used to undermine confidence in an organization, discourage support for a cause or silence activists during key campaigns and elections.