How to Decrease Cyber Threats by Reducing Software Vulnerabilities and Bugs

Abstract

As a result of technological improvements, computer systems facing not only traditional security attacks, but also facing new cyber attacks which are more sophisticated and harmful threats such as Stuxnet, and Dragonfly. These attacks may cause enormous destruction to victim machine, steal confidential information or use infected machine to attack other computerized systems. Every year, the whole world lose millions of dollars because of the cyber attack and its consequences. Each year, these kinds of attacks and impact of the cyber attacks increase rapidly. In most cases, attackers carried out direct penetration to the system or use malware to carry out malicious intents. Most of the threats and attacks that exploit existing vulnerabilities which are found in hardware, software, and network layers. Absolute security is not possible and not necessary, instead we need to provide good enough security. To protect computer system from cyber threats, deep protection mechanism such as encryption, firewall, intrusion detection, prevention and response system has been used for many years, but some new malware types bypass through those security protection, so there is an urgent need to develop new security mechanism. The goal of this study is understanding core of the attacks in advance and provide a conceptual framework to implement secure software and specify vulnerable programs automatically.