Cyber attacks are on the rise so more and more businesses have an internal team working on keeping their data secured or have gone to a professional cybersecurity company like Ostra to ensure their data is safe. Hackers and cyber thieves are always in quest of personally identifiable data that can be traded in the black market.
According to cybercrime global study reports by Accenture, the security breaches have gone up by 11% over the past year (Source).
In this post, I have described some of the top cyber risks that are affecting businesses across the world. If you or your business have been the victim of cybercrime, you’ll want to get in touch with a law firm that handles cyberlaw cases, as well as getting in touch with IT security companies to increase your cybersecurity efforts in hopes that you don’t fall victim to cybercrime again.
- The Inside Man
The biggest cyber security threat to any business is posed by its own employees. According to a report by Securitymagazine.com, employees are still falling prey to social attacks like phishing. In fact, phishing and financial pretexting cases make up 93% of the total cases of breaches investigated (Source).
Moving on, many digital assaults are the result of employees deliberately mishandling their user credentials. Other than that, making simple mistakes like visiting malware-laden links, using compromised personal devices for work or sharing credentials with an outsider are other reasons for cybercrimes. To lower the chances of employees clicking on malware-laden links, business owners could always consider using a proxy service, such as the one from https://free-proxy-list.net, to restrict their access to some websites. Hopefully, this will prevent any honest mistakes from affecting the business.
- Passwords
Passwords continue to be a significant security risk to businesses. It is seen that a majority of security breaches have resulted from stolen or lost credentials. Most of those credentials are in the form of easily hacked passwords.
It is advisable for all businesses to maintain important business accounts with a two-factor authentication system (2FA). Also, the passwords should be regularly changed to prevent cyber thieves from hacking it.
- Malware & Ransomware
Malware are malicious software that can infect any computer system. These malware are of many types – Trojans, viruses, worms, and spyware. It is important to have an anti-virus suite properly installed to protect your data from such threats.
Ransomware is a sophisticated form of malware that can prevent you or your employees from accessing the computer systems.
Both malware and ransomware can both be threats that can be decreased by the likes of business mac security software for total collaboration and security over every business device.
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
This is a type of cyber attack that overwhelms the server with requests from multiple sources. This causes a substantial slowdown in speed. It can also lead to crashing of the system. One of the biggest DDoS attacks took place in 2016, knocking down prominent sites like Netflix, Twitter and PayPal for the major part of the day (Source).
Once this attack occurs, it makes almost impossible to operate the server, until the numerous interactions are blocked or canceled.
- Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
BYOD has become an increasingly popular practice among businesses today. It allows the employees to bring in their own devices to work.
This poses a great risk to the security of an organization. Employee’s personal devices are unlikely to have the same level of security as present in corporate devices. This makes the precious data of business more vulnerable to cyber threats.
The prevalence of cyber risks has greatly increased. It is advisable for businesses to have suitable mitigation strategies in place to minimize the impact of these attacks.
Investments should be made in suitable security software to protect the company’s people, data and systems from such cyber threats.