Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity
What is cybersecurity?
- Defense against hacking, leaks, and malware
- Protecting systems, data, and users
- Now a business risk
When cybersecurity is properly adopted, what changes is not the equipment list but the way people work. When to open accounts for new hires and with what scope, how many days to revoke a departing employee's access, and which channel to use when sending drawings to partners all become fixed procedures. Security stops being the IT team's homework and becomes a working rule for HR, purchasing, and sales. So in the early stage, business teams feel the inconvenience first, while the results show up only quietly, as days when nothing goes wrong.
In practice, security is viewed in four stages: prevention, detection, response, and recovery. Firewalls, antivirus, and multi-factor authentication are prevention; log monitoring and anomaly detection are detection; isolation and notification after a confirmed breach are response; and backup restoration and resuming operations are recovery. Budgets tend to tilt toward prevention, but what determines the scale of damage is the time taken to detect and recover. You also need to distinguish information security from personal data protection. The former protects all assets, while the latter is a legal obligation, so a personal data breach carries its own deadline: notification and reporting within 72 hours of becoming aware of it.
Today’s baseline is zero trust, which drops the assumption that ‘the internal network is safe.’ Whether someone connects from the office or from home, identity and device status are verified every time, and permissions are limited to the minimum needed for the job. For backups, the 3-2-1 rule is the standard: 3 copies, 2 media types, 1 copy stored off the network. If your organization uses generative AI, you also need to manage two risks: pasting internal documents into an external model puts them outside your control, and through prompt injection, material the AI reads can itself become a leak channel.
The most common mistake in the field is thinking, 'We're too small to be a target.' Attacks don't pick targets so much as sweep for open doors, and the smaller the company, the slower detection tends to be because the person in charge is doing double duty. The second is believing that having backups is enough. A backup that has never been through a restore test is often only discovered to be unusable on the day of the incident, and if it sits on a NAS on the same network, it gets encrypted along with everything else by ransomware. The third is treating the purchase of a security solution as the finish line. If accounts of departed employees and shared IDs for partner companies are left in place, the door stays open even after you buy equipment worth hundreds of millions of won.
Jaryong KooMarketing PhD and leading authority on AI, data analytics, and personal branding
Seolyeong ParkGenerative AI and AX training specialist with 17 years of hands-on experience and 200+ sessions, making AI usable even for non-specialistsThis field developed as threats grew with the spread of computers and the internet, and its importance and scope keep expanding in the era of digital transformation, cloud, and AI.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, an auto parts manufacturer with 240 employees and KRW 170 billion (≈ US$127,188,400) in annual revenue, had its production management server infected with ransomware on a Friday night, and the line stopped on Monday morning. Backups ran daily, but they were stored on a NAS on the same network, so the backups were encrypted too, and it took three days to get back to normal operation. The CEO said, 'Let's settle this once and for all,' and handed the information strategy team an eight-week project to fix the gaps.
- The head of the information strategy team traced the access logs back and found that the VPN account of an employee at a partner company, whose business with Company A had ended two years earlier, was still active. That same week, they suspended 87 dormant accounts that had been left in the same way.
- In agreement with HR, they linked accounts so they expire automatically when an employee leaves, and turned on two-factor authentication across all internal systems. The production engineering team complained, “So we have to log in twice?”, so shop-floor tablets now use fingerprint authentication instead.
- They restructured backups on the 3-2-1 rule, keeping 1 of 3 copies isolated from the network, and added a real recovery drill every quarter. Recovery that took 11 hours in the first drill dropped to 2 hours 10 minutes by the third.
- The company ran a phishing simulation for all employees using a fake approval email that impersonated the CEO. The first-round click rate was 31%. After 30-minute one-on-one feedback sessions with the 74 people who clicked, it fell to 6% within four months.
- They put the contact order for suspected overnight or holiday breaches on a single A4 sheet and posted it on every team lead's desk. Over the next eight months there were 0 reinfections, employee-reported suspicious emails rose from 2 to 19 a month, and the cyber insurance renewal premium dropped 18%.