5 Common Cyber Threats And How You Can Protect Your Business Against Them

  • Posted On: Fri, 18 Feb 2022, 12:08 PM

 

 

5 Common Cyber Threats And How You Can Protect Your Business Against Them 

 

A cybersecurity threat is a malicious act that seeks to damage data, steal data, or disrupt digital life in general. These are the main causes behind most cyber attacks. Cyber threats also refer to the possibility of a successful cyber attack that aims to gain unauthorized access, damage, disrupt, or steal an information technology asset, computer network, intellectual property or any other form of sensitive data. Cyber threats can come from within an organization by trusted users or from remote locations by unknown parties.

 

Cyber threats are increasing day by day and with a rapid increase, these threats are becoming more dangerous and powerful. Cyber attacks and cyber crimes have increased in sophisticated volume and many hackers are using the combination of different types of attacks to seize your personal information online. While the internet is a useful tool for gaining knowledge, it also includes several risks. The list of such cyber threats is extensive, however, there are most 5 common Cyber threats mentioned below:-

 

1.  Phishing

 

In a phishing attack, a digital message is sent to fool people into clicking a link inside of it. There are several possibilities for malicious actors to use such campaigns. Depending on the intention of the actor, harmful malware is installed or sensitive data is exposed. Usually phishing attacks use fake communication, such as an email, to trick the receiver into opening it and carrying out the instructions inside, such as providing a credit card number. The email looks so real that the receiver clicks it and then gets in trouble.

 

According to Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report, phishing attacks are the most common cause of data breaches globally and have been the root cause of notable instances of cybercrime in the last decade.

How to Protect Your Business Against Phishing Attacks

The best way to protect your organization against phishing attacks is to educate your employees on how to spot a questionable email or text message. The training programs below can help you do this:

 

 

Additionally, MCS Security Solutions can also help you train your teams to spot phishing attacks.

 

2. Malware

 

Malware is the collective name for a number of malicious software variants. Examples of common malware include viruses, worms, Trojan viruses, spyware, adware, and ransomware. Recent malware attacks have exfiltrated data in mass amounts. It is used in several ways. Malware is activated when a user clicks on a malicious link or attachment, which leads to installing dangerous software. Cisco reports that malware, once activated, it can do :

 

Block access to key network components (Ransomware)

  • Install additional harmful software

  • Covertly obtain information by transmitting data from the hard drive (Spyware)

  • Disrupt individual parts, making the system inoperable and Unusable.

 

 

How to Protect Your Business Against Malware Attacks

Teaching your employees how to spot suspicious links and pop-ups that could contain malware will help reduce the chance that it could infect your systems.

Additional ways to protect against malware include keeping your operating systems up to date to ensure known security gaps are patched and using anti-virus software. For example, the Equifax data breach could have been prevented had a known patch been installed in time.

 

3. Man in the Middle 

 

A man in the middle (MITM) attack is a general term for when a cyber criminal positions himself in a conversation between a user and an application, either to eavesdrop or to impersonate one of the parties, making it appear as if a normal exchange of information is underway. The primary goal of an attack is to steal personal information, such as login credentials, account details and credit card numbers. Targeted persons are typically the users of financial applications, SaaS businesses, e-commerce sites and other websites where logging in is required. The Information obtained during an attack could be used for many purposes , including identity theft, unapproved fund transfers or an illicit password change of system.

How to Protect Your Business Against MitM Attacks

 

End-to-end encryption protocols like Transport Layer Security (TLS) are the best way to protect against MitM attacks. Additionally, requiring your employees to use a VPN to access company networks over public WiFi will ensure that any information shared during their session remains private, regardless of whether the network belongs to a bad actor or if their coffee shop’s WiFi is simply unsecured.

 

4. Denial of Service

 

A denial of service (DoS) is a type of cyber attack that floods a computer or network with requests so users can't access the system. A distributed DoS (DDoS) does the same thing, but the attack originates from a computer network. It is more lethal. Cyber attackers often use a flood attack to disrupt the “handshake” process and carry out a DoS. Several other techniques may be used, and some cyber attackers use the time that a network is disabled to launch other attacks. A botnet is a type of DDoS in which millions of systems can be infected with malware and controlled by a hacker. Botnets, sometimes called zombie systems, target and overwhelm a target’s processing capabilities. Botnets are in different geographic locations and they are hard to trace.

 

How to Protect Your Business Against DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks are tricky to identify because they’re often hard to distinguish from legitimate traffic. Some methods of protecting against DDoS attacks include blocking all traffic for a short period of time, rate-limiting traffic to a website, using a web application firewall to detect suspicious traffic patterns, or scattering traffic across a network of servers to reduce the attack’s impact.

5. Credential Stuffing Attacks

Credential stuffing is a type of brute-force cyber-attack where bad actors use stolen usernames and passwords from one data breach to access user accounts at another organization.

Credential stuffing is possible because, statistically, 65% of all people reuse the same password across multiple accounts. As a result, credential stuffing attacks are one of the most common causes of data breaches globally.

How to Protect Your Business Against Credential Stuffing Attacks

The best way to protect against credential stuffing attacks is by either implementing passwordless authentication or multi-factor authentication (MFA). Passwordless authentication prevents bad actors from using stolen credentials by eliminating them altogether, while MFA requires bad actors to verify their identity in one or more ways in addition to the stolen credentials they’re using to log in.

Conclusion

Mounting a good defense requires understanding the offense. This article has reviewed the 5 most common cyber-security attacks that hackers use to disrupt and compromise information systems. As you can see, attackers have many options, such as DDoS assaults, malware infection, man-in-the-middle interception…etc, to try to gain unauthorized access to critical infrastructures and sensitive data.

 

Measures to mitigate these threats vary, but security basics stay the same: Keep your systems and anti-virus databases up to date, train your employees, configure your firewall to whitelist only the specific ports and hosts you need, keep your passwords strong, use a least-privilege model in your IT environment, make regular backups, and continuously audit your IT systems for suspicious activity.