Students of Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Manav Rachna International University, attended a webinar On ‘Cyber Security and Digital Forensics’, by IBM on February 21, 2017, at its MRIU Campus, Faridabad. The attendees gathered in a lecture theatre, where the lecture was streamed live.

The webinar informed the audience all about the data security, its needs and benefits, what data should be protected and what are threats against it. The session started with the speaker introducing the concept of data security and data protection. Data protection not only mean protecting the data but it implies that if by any chance data get accessed by any unauthorised entity it remains protected by the means of encryption techniques. Thereafter the need and importance of data security was explained: some data if not protected can have catastrophic effects on business productivity and the organisation infrastructure, data security is also important to ensure reputational advantages and the ongoing productivity.

The foremost thing an organisation can do is to classify the data that has to be protected: what is important to them, what data can be considered critical and sensitive, loosing which can lead to a loss of some kind. This leads to the next section that talk about the critical data for an organisation which may be the customer, product, employee and company information or the cost, the price of disruption etc. Then comes the process of data security that includes the design, the implementation and the monitoring of all the assets and data that an organisation holds.

In the later stage of the session, all the threats associated with the data, that can potentially cause any harm to the data were discussed which included the malware threats: different types of viruses, Trojan horses, network based threats:  botnet, phishing, cryptographic attacks: weak key attack, birthday attack, database threats, banking frauds and more. All the benefits of data security that involves ensuring the CIA trade, cost effectiveness, no misuse of data were explained at last. The webinar concluded with questions that students had, which were all answered expertly by the speaker. All in all it was a very interactive and knowledgeable experience for the students who learned all about data security holistically.