Cyber Attacks Protection

The Top 10 Cyber Threats Facing Businesses Today

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Small and Medium-sized businesses continue to be regular targets of cyberattacks. These threats are getting more progressively complex and determined since hackers and cybercriminals see some businesses as vulnerable and an easy target. The most common cyber-attacks businesses experience is:

  1. Phishing

Phishing is a cybercrime wherein targets are reached by email, uses disguised email as a weapon. The goal is to fool the email recipient into believing that the message is something they need or want, acting as a legitimate institution to draw individuals into providing sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, banking and credit card details, and passwords. The types of phishing attacks are spear phishing, whaling, clone phishing, link manipulation, filter evasion, website forgery, covert redirect, social engineering etc.

  1. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to make an online administration inaccessible by overwhelming a network with high-volume of unwanted traffic from multiple sources. They target a wide variety of vital resources, from banks, news websites, and present a significant challenge, making sure people can publish and access important information. The vast traffic exhausts the bandwidth rendering them unable to respond to legitimate requests. Primarily, a network of botnets is used to execute a DDoS attack.

  1. Password or Brute Force

A brute force attack is a cyberattack that floods the server with requests from numerous sources, driving it to become overwhelmed to the point of slowing down substantially or even crashing. It is a trial-and-error method used to obtain information such as a user password or personal identification number (pin) and eventually finding the right one.

In a brute force attack, automated software is utilized to generate a massive number of consecutive guesses as to the value of the required data. Brute force attacks may be used by criminals to crack encrypted data, or by security, examiners to test an association’s network security.

  1. Ransomware

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that blocks access to a computer system or data, usually by encrypting it, until the victim pays a fee to the attacker. In many cases, the ransom demand comes with a deadline. If the victim doesn’t pay in time, the data is gone forever.

Ransomware attacks are all too common these days. Major companies in North America and Europe alike have fallen victim to it. Cybercriminals will attack any consumer, or any business and victims come from all industries.

  1. Spyware

Spyware is unwanted software that pierces your computing device, stealing your internet usage data and sensitive information. It collects data about your surfing habits, browsing history, or personal information and often uses the Internet to pass this data along to third parties without you knowing.

Spyware is often bunched with other software or downloaded files-sharing sites or gets installed when you open an email attachment. Because of the hidden nature of spyware, most people are not aware when spyware is on a computer that’s unprotected by anti-spyware.

  1. Cross-Site Scripting

In cross-site scripting (XSS), the attacker aims to execute malicious scripts in a web browser of the victim by including malicious code in an official web page or web application. The actual attack cause when the victim visits the web page or web application that is executing the malicious code. The web application becomes a medium to deliver the malicious script to the user’s browser. Vulnerable mediums that are commonly used for cross-site scripting attacks are web pages, message boards, and forums.

A web page or web application is susceptible to XSS if it utilizes unsensitized user input in the output that it generates. The victim’s browser must then parse this user input.

  1. Insider

An insider threat can occur when someone close to an organization with authorized access misuses that access to impact the organization’s critical information or systems negatively. It is considered to be the deadliest among all cyber-attacks as they are at the mercy of fundamental human error. Most of the attacks happen by accident or out of the negligence of an employee, which can be avoided only by training the staff on cybersecurity awareness.

An insider threat may also be described as a threat that cannot be prevented by traditional security measures that aim at restricting access to unauthorized networks from outside the organization or defending against conventional hacking methods.

  1. Advanced Persistent Threats (APT)

An advanced persistent threat is an attack wherein an unauthorized user accesses a framework or network and remains there for a more extended period without being detected. Advanced persistent threats are particularly hazardous for enterprises, as hackers have ongoing access to sensitive organization data. Advanced persistent threats usually do not cause damage to organizations networks or local machines. Instead, the goal of advanced persistent threats is most often data theft.

Advanced persistent threats typically have several phases, including hacking the network, avoiding detection, constructing a plan of attack and mapping company data to determine where the desired data is most accessible, gathering sensitive company data, and exfiltrating that data.

  1. Macro Viruses

A macro virus is a computer virus written in the programming language that is used for software applications, such as macros for Microsoft office are currently written in Visual Basic for applications.

Macro viruses generally spread through phishing emails containing attachments that have been implanted with the virus. The virus will access the files in the recipient’s address book and send an infected email to everyone from the contact list.

As the email looks to be received from a reliable source, many email recipients open it. And once the infected macro is executed, it can jump to every other document on the user’s computer and infect them.

  1. SQL Injection

SQL injection attacks occur when an attacker injects a malicious query into an SQL database that forces the server to expose sensitive data from the database. The SQL query is executed into an input field on a webpage such as a login field through which an attacker cannot just peek into the database but also modify it. The attacker runs an administrative command to add, edit or expose the data or wipe it out from the database.

These are the most widely understood attack patterns. The growing businesses must make on-going cybersecurity training a priority for all employees while establishing a multi-layered security strategy. Proactively keeping employees safe online and using the latest threat intelligence to stop threats before and after they have entered the company network is more significant.

Other Types Of Cyber Attacks:

Zero-day Exploit

These exploits are carried out the duration when the vulnerability is identified, and a patch is released to cover it. Tools are created by hackers based on the type of vulnerability and launch them to exploit it for their benefit.

Birthday

This is basically a brute force attack who’s intention is to crash the hash algorithms. Another type of cryptographic attack where the targeted algorithms is checked the integrity of the data available.

Drive-by-downloads

Vulnerabilities are constantly searched on websites. Once these vulnerabilites are found they inject malicious code into the current PHP or HTTP code.

Eavesdropping attack

This attack intercepts a network and eavesdrops over the transmitting data. The attacker can therefore gain access to victim’s credential information which may include login details, credit card number, or passwords. procedure to defend from this type of attack is to use a virtual protocol network (VPN)

 Middle Man

These are usually carried out on open and unprotected wi-fi connection. Free wi-fi connection in hotels, cafe’s and public places are where they strike. Hackers search for people using confidential information like credit card details on the internet.

 

posted by Pinnacle Marketing Dept