5 cyber security threats you need to be watchful of.
Cybercrime is increasing drastically every year and can happen for a number of different reasons and in a number of different ways. A cyberattack is where a criminal tries to gain unauthorized access for the purpose of theft, extortion, disruption or other reasons.
There are various different ways that an attacker can infiltrate an IT system. Barracuda a company that provides security, networking, and storage products based on network appliances and cloud services claims that there are 5 common types of cyber-security threats one need to be watchful of. Here's the list:
Ransomware
Cybercriminals use malicious software to infect the network of the organisation and encrypt important data, and other useful files until a ransom is paid. These evolving attacks are damaging and costly and can cripple the day-to-day operations of the organization, cause chaos and damage, and result in financial losses, recovery costs, etc.
Phishing email
Hackers carefully tailor phishing email attacks to its victims by collecting personal information and playing to the sense of urgency to get a response. The attackers only need one person within the company to click on the link or open an attachment to compromise an email account and move laterally to launch subsequent attacks close contacts in the company or partners at external organizations.
Business email compromise (BEC)
It is an exploit in which an attacker obtains access to a business email account and imitates the owner’s identity, in order to defraud the company and its employees, customers or partners. In most cases, scammers will focus their efforts on the employees with access to company finances, and attempt to trick them into performing wire transfers to bank accounts thought to be trusted, when in reality the money ends up in accounts owned by the criminals.
Malware
Malware is a short form for ‘malicious software' and is a type of application that can perform a variety of malicious tasks such as Viruses, spyware, rootkits, keyloggers, and exploits. It is designed to create access to a network, to spy in order to obtain credentials or other important data and files. Hackers share harmless-looking emails with the user with malware attached as a zip file or in an email attachment which results in ransomware, spyware, and other damaging programs.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack
In a DDoS attack, the attacker uses many different sources and botnets to launch the fake traffic in which an attacker takes advantage of a known performance problem in application to overload it. Attackers can bring down websites and cause severe disruption to business operations. It can do more damage by making business-critical applications unavailable to legitimate users for a longer period of time. The majority of victims of DDoS attacks are small to medium size businesses.
