Creating Cyber Immunity in the Era of Interconnected Technologies: The How-To Today, to maintain and protect the integrity of infrastructure, a new way to enhance IT security is needed.

From the intricacies of interconnectedness to ever-expanding artificial intelligence (AI), the dynamic landscape of technology continues its heady evolution, bringing forth both unprecedented opportunities and challenges. Recent research by our experts has revealed that more than 50% of organizations have already implemented AI and the internet of things (IoT) in their infrastructures. And more than 30% are planning to adopt these interconnected technologies (i.e., devices and systems connected to the internet and each other) within the next two years.

Indeed, such technologies transform organizations, helping them gather more data and automate business processes. But (there's always a "but" in this imperfect world) as more individual users and businesses invest in or adopt interconnected technologies, the potential exposure to cyberthreats and attacks increases too. On top of that, cybercriminal attacks are growing exponentially in both sophistication and volume: throughout 2024 every day we collected on average around 467,000 new unique malicious files.

Moreover, because AI and IoT have become so widespread, this trend has given rise to new vulnerabilities and new vectors of complex cyberattacks – for example, AI-enhanced cyberthreats, which are capable of adapting on the fly. The use of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create realistic fake identities for social engineering attacks, and the development of AI-driven malware that can mutate to avoid detection, represent just a small glimpse of what the future might hold.

Under such circumstances, and given the scale of change that interconnected technologies are likely to bring, the traditional approach to the cybersecurity of IT systems becomes less and less effective. And today, to maintain and protect the integrity of infrastructure, a new way to enhance IT security is needed.

As a response to such a challenge, our experts created a fundamentally new approach to IT solutions' protection – Cyber Immunity. Cyber Immunity is a proactive, secure-by-design approach, while traditional cybersecurity is more of a reactive measure.

At the heart of Cyber Immunity, lies our own Cyber Immune operating system (KasperskyOS) – a platform for building Cyber Immune products, which was developed from scratch. Its architecture is based on the division of its various elements into many isolated modules.

Such an operating system provides the possibility to build IT-systems where, though cybercriminals (with great diligence) may be able to affect one or more untrusted components, they won't be able to develop an attack or affect the performance of critical system functions. Affecting the trusted components is highly unlikely given the minimal and well-tested trusted computing base. One doesn't even need antivirus here!

To achieve Cyber Immunity when building upon KasperskyOS, solution developers need follow a special methodology: any action not explicitly permitted by the security policy is blocked before it's performed. This default-deny principle allows to create security policies that can meet specific security goals, making sure that potentially dangerous operations are blocked. Thus, Cyber Immune products have "inherent" protection from most types of cyberattacks. With Cyber Immunity we've moved away from the "virus > antivirus" and "vulnerability > patch" paradigms – and this is a true breakthrough.

I cannot overestimate the importance of such an unprecedented level of cybersecurity when it comes to the protection of various critical infrastructure objects – governments and public digital systems containing a huge amount of sensitive data; the healthcare sector, energy plants, transportation systems, oil-and-gas industry installations, etc.

The consequences of a cyberattack targeting these sectors are huge since they can directly affect the functioning of society and even national economies. Their security is a priority and an extremely challenging task at the same time. These sectors need to move away from reacting to cyberattacks and become proactive in their approach. Better yet, they need to invest in systems and solutions where security is built into them right from the design stage.

Thus, in the fast-paced digital world of today, to enjoy the full benefits of complex interconnected technologies, quality protection needs to be assured. And this is where Cyber Immunity comes in. By integrating cybersecurity into each stage of the software development lifecycle, secure-by-design software and hardware become resilient against cyberattacks, contributing to the overall security of digital systems. Cyber Immunity is all about developing an ecosystem with "innate" protection – where all connected elements are protected.