Anyone that oversees large amounts of data knows cyberattacks and network breaches are inevitable. Traditional prevention and detection technologies are not enough to protect network confidentiality, integrity or availability. Simple firewalls and antivirus software don’t provide enough proactive and predictive defense to meet modern cyberattack sophistication.
For engineers and tech designers, the challenge lies in understanding how to protect the digital infrastructure that underpins modern business and build a critical line of defense that limits operational disruption and financial loss. Advanced tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation now exist to proactively detect threats and protect against the rising tide of unauthorized access, misuse and theft.
The nature of modern threats
Network attacks have evolved from basic intrusions to highly sophisticated and targeted operations. Early defenses focused on perimeter security, but modern networks contend with advanced persistent threats (APTs), zero-day exploits and AI-driven attacks that adapt in real time to evade detection.
Certain older security measures have proven insufficient or obsolete, such as:
- Perimeter defenses: Today’s attackers can easily bypass firewalls or other perimeter defenses through social engineering, credential theft or by exploiting vulnerabilities in publicly exposed services, rendering these methods largely ineffective.
- Signature-based detection systems: Traditional antivirus and intrusion detection systems that rely on known signatures are ineffective against modern threats such as zero-day exploits and polymorphic malware, which constantly evolve to evade detection.
- Manual incident response: Manual responses are often too slow to contain or mitigate damage.
- Single-factor authentication (SFA): Though password-based single-factor authentication (SFA) has long been the standard for securing user accounts, with the widespread use of password-cracking tools, phishing schemes and credential theft, relying on passwords alone significantly exposes a network to breaches.
- Patch-and-pray mentality: Periodic patching is inadequate as a sole defense when vulnerabilities can be exploited within hours or even minutes of discovery.
- VPN-only (VPN) access control: Once considered a secure way to provide remote access, VPNs don’t work well in highly decentralized networks. VPNs create a broad access tunnel, often granting users access to more resources than necessary and creating vulnerabilities if credentials are stolen or misused.
- Static security policies: Static, pre-defined security policies that do not evolve with emerging threats may not account for new types of attacks that exploit gaps and blind spots in a system.
- Unencrypted communication: Failing to encrypt internal communications because the assumption that internal threats are minimal is a dangerous practice. Insider threats and advanced attackers can move laterally within networks by intercepting sensitive data and exposing valuable information.
- Security through obscurity: This approach assumes that attackers are less likely to find vulnerabilities or targets if they are hidden or obscure (e.g., using non-standard ports or proprietary software without proper defenses). This practice provides a false sense of security because attackers today use sophisticated scanning tools that quickly discover obscured elements.
- Log analysis post-incident: Traditional methods of analyzing logs after a breach do not take into consideration that attackers can infiltrate and exfiltrate data within minutes or hours, causing heavy damage that is costly to fix.
While effective in their time, these measures have proven insufficient against today’s advanced and rapidly evolving threats. As these outdated defenses fall short, the consequences of a breach become more severe.
The operational disruption and costs of breaches
A cyberattack can cripple an organization, bringing operations to a standstill and freezing communications. A severe breach can derail business continuity and cascade across entire infrastructures. If ransomware hits, a company faces a grim decision; pay up or attempt recovery at great expense. The financial burden can balloon beyond ransom payments, with costs piling up from restoring systems, hiring forensic experts, and rebuilding compromised data. Beyond monetary loss, breaches damage trust when customers and partners lose confidence in an organization’s ability to safeguard their data.
Research from IBM and Ponemon Institute recently provided insight from the experiences of 604 organizations and 3,556 cybersecurity and business leaders hit by a breach. They project the global average cost of a data breach in 2024 to be $4.48 million, an increase of 10% from 2023 and the highest total on record. One in three breaches involved shadow data, unmonitored or unprotected data dispersed across multiple environments, making it harder to track and contain. Breaches in public clouds are particularly costly, with an average impact of $5.17 million.
However, the report also found that companies deploying AI and automation significantly reduced their exposure, saving an average of $2.22 million per incident. These findings underscore the importance of engineers and tech designers to build security into the architecture at every layer, ensuring that networks can not only detect and prevent attacks, but also recover quickly when they occur.
While many older security technologies are becoming obsolete, new technologies and solutions are on the horizon to help engineers and designers thwart future hacks and attacks. Source: patcharida/Adobe Stock
What works now
To secure modern networks, engineers are adopting more adaptive, and proactive security strategies involving multi-layered defenses with a focus on segmentation, monitoring and real-time analytics. The emphasis has shifted toward embedding security from the start, rather than retrofitting it after vulnerabilities have been exposed.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) encourages users and network administrators to implement the following recommendations to better secure their network infrastructure:
- Segment and segregate networks and functions.
- Limit unnecessary lateral communications.
- Harden network devices.
- Secure access to infrastructure devices.
- Perform out-of-band (OoB) network management.
- Validate integrity of hardware and software.
Current technologies that have shown significant promise in securing networks are built around a philosophy of continuous monitoring, rapid response and segmentation. These include:
- Zero trust architecture: Zero Trust assumes every user and device is a potential threat. It enforces strict access controls in decentralized, cloud-based environments where perimeter defenses fall short.
- AI and machine learning: AI and ML detect anomalies in real time and spot attacks that evade traditional defenses with adaptive precision. Combined with behavioral analytics, ML flags unusual patterns that traditional systems miss and proactively identifies insider threats or compromised accounts before they cause severe damage.
- Network segmentation and micro segmentation: Breaking down a network into smaller, isolated segments limits attackers' lateral movement. Micro segmentation takes it further by applying fine-tuned controls to reduce the risk of widespread compromise.
- Encryption at every layer: End-to-end encryption protects sensitive data, but with quantum computing looming, quantum-resistant encryption future-proofs networks.
- Automated incident response: Automated systems provide a significant advantage in minimizing damage costs by responding to breaches instantly and in real time, ensuring swift containment and reducing the overall impact on operations.
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA): MFA adds an extra layer of defense by requiring multiple forms of authentication to make it harder for attackers to gain unauthorized access.
- Cloud security posture management (CSPM): As organizations move to the cloud, CSPM tools proactively monitor configurations, detecting vulnerabilities and ensure compliance before risks escalate into full-scale breaches.
While these methods are proving effective, the next wave of technology is already beginning to address vulnerabilities that current systems cannot.
What might work in the future
Looking ahead, there are technologies and strategies in development to further secure networks. Though they face significant challenges, it is believed they will be able to address vulnerabilities that current systems cannot.
With quantum computing poised to disrupt current encryption standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is leading the charge in developing post-quantum cryptographic algorithms. As it nears practical reality, it offers a theoretically unbreakable method of transmitting encryption keys. Quantum cryptography could revolutionize secure communications if challenges related to range, speed and infrastructure can be surmounted.
AI's current application in network security is largely centered on detection and analysis. Future systems may involve fully autonomous defenses that leverage AI to make fully independent responses to cyber threats. The challenge here is to ensure they don’t produce false positives that inadvertently disrupt legitimate operations or cause collateral damage.
While blockchain is better known for its role in cryptocurrencies, its decentralized and immutable nature holds potential for securing networks, particularly in identity verification and data integrity. Blockchain-based systems could provide tamper-proof logs of network activity, making it nearly impossible for attackers to erase traces of their presence. However, the scalability of blockchain-based security systems remains an open question, especially for real-time applications.
Striking the right balance between autonomy and human oversight will be essential as these systems evolve as will ensuring that such defenses are fail-safe and can operate reliably in complex network environments.
Conclusion
Looking forward, the task for engineers and tech designers is clear: adapt, innovate and stay ahead of an evolving landscape of threat. The rise of quantum computing, autonomous AI and blockchain technologies presents both challenges and opportunities. While strategies like zero trust architecture and AI-driven detection have laid a solid foundation, future-proofing networks requires building systems that are not only secure but also flexible and resilient. In other words, industry leaders must integrate newer technologies to create defenses capable of evolving alongside the threats.
Success hinges on ensuring new technologies enhance security without introducing vulnerabilities. The networks of tomorrow must not just defend but also anticipate and adapt to continuously changing cyber threats, positioning themselves to learn, think and protect against the challenges ahead.