Good day!
A great deal of our esteemed members were kind enough to use our Community to search for information regarding the enterprise network throughout the course of last year and one of the hottest keywords was - surprisingly or not - 'Security'.
This only proves what we already knew - informational security is omnipresent nowadays, especially in the enterprise environment, wherein each business wants to keep their information safe. But where did it all start? Find out in this post about the evolution of informational security!
THE EARLY TIMES - THE '60s
This is the decade when enterprises firstly took into consideration the security of their private information. Since computers were the size of a room and they would require the physical presence of human in order to be operated, companies would basically implement passwords and access point security measures in order to prevent unauthorized humans from breaching into their computer rooms.
All this proved to be efficient... until it didn't anymore.
THE FIRST HACKER ATTACK - THE '70s
The 1970s mark the start of the informational security hacking era, when the first ever computer 'worm' was recorded to have breached organisations' informational security. (Ray Tomlinson's upgraded version of CREEPER). Below can be found the initial mapping of CREEPER, as part of ARPANET's (The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) first cybersecurity research project:
Source: https://www.ifsecglobal.com/cyber-security/a-history-of-information-security/#:~:text=It was during the 1960s,how to work a computer.
As the enterprise information would flow exclusively via telephone lines (to which company computers were linked), the first ever hackers would breach those telephone lines in order to steal the enterprise data. Organisations had to step up their informational security game.
THE BIRTH OF THE INTERNET - THE '80s
This is the decade when the above-mentioned ARPANET's 'innocent' cybersecurity research project become what we now call the 'Internet'. This meant more devices than ever were interconnected and... 'there for the hacking'.
Given the many previous data breaches, governments and oganisations intensified their informational security efforts. However, military secret stealing and bank frauds done via computer-generated worms became the norm. Informational security was not at its highest peak.
THE FIREWALL ERA - THE '90s
The 1990s. What a time to be alive, as humanity reaches new heights in terms of interconnectivity. The Internet becomes the place where people from all over the world could interact easily. People from all over the world communicating means people from all over the world giving away their personal information, which could be easily 'grabbed' from the interaction platform.
That's when firewalls came into place and became the main informational security norm, alongside the very fast antivirus programs, which, of course, were very expensive and definitely not hacker-proof at first.
THE CRITICAL MASS WAS REACHED - THE '00s
As this paragraph's caption reads, critical mass was reached in the 2000s, when governments quit taking cybercrimes lightly and started imposing massive sentences for hackers.
Even though significant efforts had been made by enterprises and the public sector to limit informational attacks, hackers easily adapted, being able to target more than just office/public authority buildings - I'm talking entire continents.
SECURITY BECOMES TOP PRIORITY - THE '10s UNTIL TODAY
'The Decade of Major Breeches' (as some call the 2010s) was the era when a well-struck data breach could bring down entire corporations by making them go bankrupt, as it could also leak top secret government information to the public that is sensitive enough to drive regime changes.
This is when literally everyone realized the importance of attack-proof informational security. Organizations developed what we today call 'encryption systems' which scramble data to render it unreadable to unauthorized users. This was the result of the industrial digital transformation and 'cloudification' enterprises have undergone since the start of last decade and is continuing nowadays as well.
THE BOTTOM LINE
No one knows what next decade will bring in terms of informational security measures, but one thing is for certain - everyone is taking it extremely serious in the current 'all-smart' era.
What do you think the informational security measures will look like in 2030? Leave a comment below and don't forget to subscribe to the Community blog for more content like this!
