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Hackers always strive to stay on top of the newest trends and updates to overcome the latest defense mechanism. Similar to hackers, cybersecurity experts constantly formulate and develop more secure, stable, and better systems and applications. For an organization to understand the importance of cybersecurity and how to safeguard systems against hackers, it is instrumental in observing things from a hacker’s perspective. When cybersecurity experts comprehend the mysterious nature of human attackers and how they function, experts can get enabled to protect systems more comprehensively and better. Conventional security systems, including antivirus and firewalls, now seldom stops attackers.

Personality Characteristics

Hackers are human beings and have personality characteristics attributed to them. The most common characteristics of hackers include creativity, high intelligence, and also consuming curiosity. Hackers are also highly adaptive as they have to face up to robust, super, and highly intelligent computing systems. Most conventional hackers are relatively anti-conformist and individualistic. Generally, high intelligence is common between hackers, although it is not the type of intelligence one might expect (Snyder et al., 2016). These hackers also posses another vital trait, which is the ability to mentally retain, absorb, and vast reference amounts of meaningless details, trusting to utilize them later to give it meaning and context. These high mental performances get expected and routine for any hacker.

Contrary to traditional stereotypes, these attackers are not usually intellectually narrow. However, hackers tend to be interested in topics and subjects that offer mental stimulation. The more efficient and better an attacker is at hacking, the more likely they have other interests at which they are more than just competent. Human attackers can get viewed as control freaks who enjoy making complex things such as computing systems do nifty stuff at their command (Ogbanufe et al., 2017). Hackers are normally weakly motivated by traditional rewards such as money or social approval. They tend to be creative and attracted by challenges and get excited by interesting toys.

Human attackers tend to judge the interests of activities, including work based on the toys they get to play with and the challenges offered. According to Myers Briggs and other similar psychometric systems, hackers are thinker, introverted, and intuitive types that the relatively rare INTP and INTJ types. There are also other psychometric types among hackers but are only a minority. Cybersecurity experts, therefore, have a huge and vital task of defending systems against highly adaptive, intelligent, and creative human attackers.

Cyber Security Best Practices

Organizations have to always be vigilant and effective in protecting their sensitive data and systems from attacks. Even when a computing system appears secure, it could get broken down or circumvented easily. Any organization also needs to implement several layers of defense, ranging from very complex to simple methodologies. The best layers of security will be unpredictable and adaptive to match the hacker’s unpredictability (Mann, 2017). Additionally, spending more money on cybersecurity does not imply the company will get more successful. Some of the biggest hacks have traditionally been against organizations with robust costly systems in place. The key to cybersecurity against hackers is strategic to what actually keeps the attacker outside and combining technology with human monitoring.

Finally, organizations need to constantly monitor their digital portfolio and platforms to quickly identify when they get hacked and what data got stolen or compromised. By constantly monitoring digital systems and staying on top of things, an organization can quickly identify an attack and mitigate the situation before it gets out of control. Understanding cybersecurity threats from a hacker’s view can help organizations gain a new perspective and look for risks not previously identified (Snyder et al., 2016). Organizations need to always be on guard to keep their digital information truly safe and secure.

References

Ogbanufe, O., & Kim, D. J. (2017). Hackers Delight: Knowledge Sharing Motives.

Snyder, P., & Vault, A. (2016). Playing hackers at their own game. Network Security, 2016(11), 14-16.

Mann, I. (2017). Hacking the human: social engineering techniques and security countermeasures. Routledge.