Playing defense: today’s top data center security risks

Businesses and organizations in every industry, from education to healthcare, face more cyberattacks than ever. The primary target of these attacks is often what many organizations consider one of their most valuable assets – their data. Whether it’s private health information, student records, intellectual property, consumer purchasing history or anything in between, the ability to store, access and protect data is a key operational requirement and a significant driver of competitive advantage.

As the value of data increases, so does the cost of a successful attack. The percentage of organizations reporting a breach costing $1 million or more over the past three years has risen from 27% to 36% in just a year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’s 2024 Global Digital Trust Insights survey. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warns that financially motivated cyber threat actors are likely to impose significant financial costs on the U.S. economy in 2024 in its Homeland Threat Assessment 2024 report.

Changes in the way we work, such as the increasing adoption of cloud applications and hybrid workplaces, have also created new challenges for managing and securing data. To meet the needs of a quickly evolving data security landscape, organizations must take a comprehensive, defense-in-depth approach to secure sensitive data and meet the latest compliance requirements. This must include protecting data where it lives – in the data center.

The secure management of on-premise data center technology requires both a strong understanding of the latest data security risks and a secure data storage infrastructure that can evolve with the threat landscape. For many organizations, this includes a shift to solid state drives (SSDs) with built-in encryption.

Top data center security risks

Many of the cybersecurity concerns that have dominated the threat landscape in recent years remain today. However, they are evolving as cybercriminals apply new tools and levels of sophistication. For example, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models will enable threat actors to develop and scale attacks in ways they couldn’t before.

Ransomware

Cybercriminals are developing new methods of ransomware to extort organizations financially by denying them access to their data via a variety of means. This includes multi-level extortion where they encrypt their victim’s data, threaten to publicly release the data, use distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and harass the victim’s customers to coerce the victim to pay. Attackers are also getting better at evading detection using tactics like intermittent encryption or the partial encryption of files, which speeds the attack process. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is tracking new ransomware trends, warning that cybercriminals have begun conducting multiple attacks on the same victim and employing data destruction methods to pressure victims to negotiate.

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Social engineering and phishing attacks

Email hacking continues to be one of the costliest cybercrime activities, totaling $2.7 billion in 2022, according to DHS. Cybercriminals use social engineering, such as phishing, or computer intrusion techniques to compromise email accounts and conduct unauthorized money transfers. Social engineering attacks are becoming increasingly difficult to spot with some even including a CAPTCHA verification to look more legitimate.

Threat actors are also going beyond email, engineering new types of attacks that use text messaging, collaboration tools and fake voicemails to trick victims into divulging confidential information, including passwords and usernames, that can be used to infiltrate enterprise networks.

Staffing shortages and supply chain vulnerabilities

The shortage of cybersecurity professionals remains a persistent challenge for organizations of all sizes. In fact, 67% of security practitioners reported that their organization has a shortage of cybersecurity staff needed to prevent and troubleshoot security issues, according to the 2023 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce study.

Enterprise security teams are also grappling with insider threats and challenges in the software supply chain, including the increasing prevalence of third-party software attacks with cascading impacts.

Cybersecurity planning must reach into the data center

To safeguard data, businesses must take a holistic, multi-layered cybersecurity security approach that encompasses their storage infrastructure.

Enterprise security strategies are rapidly evolving to address both the changing threat landscape and the ways in which we interact with technology. One key development is the trend toward a Zero Trust model, which is based on the principle that no user or device can be trusted by default. It recognizes that a secure perimeter no longer exists and applies the same scrutiny to every access request whether it originates from inside or outside the network.

No matter which model organizations use for their broader cybersecurity strategy, it is important not to overlook the security of the data center storage infrastructure given the central role it plays in data protection. This includes reliable storage solutions that enable secure data transfer, data encryption, long-term data storage and archiving. Solid state drives (SSDs) meet all of those needs while providing lower power consumption, faster boot and transfer times and large capacity potential.

Samsung SSDs — both Samsung PM9A3 NVMe PCIe SSD and Samsung PM893 SATA SSD — automatically encrypt data in production and backups to help organizations protect their data with the strongest encryption algorithm available today.

Samsung PM9A3 SSD, designed for enterprise and large-scale cloud data centers, also keeps sensitive data protected with a secure boot feature that cryptographically verifies the integrity of every firmware image’s RSA digital signature prior to execution. This helps defend it against advanced security threats that target device firmware. Furthermore, Samsung data center SSDs are highly reliable when protecting against data corruption in case of power failures.

Data security is an essential requirement of data center operations, and choosing storage solutions with built-in protections can mitigate data security risks and help address data center compliance regulations. Samsung’s portfolio of data center SSDs was designed to meet the data protection demands of an ever-evolving threat environment and help enterprise customers bolster the security of their data storage infrastructure.

Learn more about which Samsung SSD is right for your business and security needs.