With more people working from home or in hybrid situations, employees are more vulnerable than ever to cyberattacks. From using personal devices and public wifi to lack of security awareness, it’s more important than ever for you and your team to understand the threats and what steps you can take to mitigate your risk.
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The “threatscape”
Cyberthreats are constantly evolving and becoming increasingly sophisticated. There are four common threats businesses are facing, which are often used together. We refer to these collectively as the threatscape and understanding these common attacks is the first step in protecting your business from them.
1. Social Engineering
Social engineering aims to defraud your people into revealing privileged information in order to benefit the bad actor. This often results in providing credentials or transferring money to the criminal. Social engineering attacks can often come in the form of phishing attacks. Phishing can range from poorly-written mass emails to highly researched and targeted attacks on your people.
Solution: Provide your team with security awareness training and testing. They will learn how to identify phishing attacks and implement proper security hygiene. Test your team by conducting routine mock phishing attacks to help them remain vigilant.
2. Ransomware/Malware
Ransomeware and malware is software that is installed on your company’s systems and compromises your private data. This can prevent you from accessing that data and whatever system it was installed on. To regain access, you will be asked to pay a ransom fee, and even if you pay, there is no guarantee you will get your access back.
Solution: Perform recovery readiness planning for each of your critical systems. This means you’ve identified the systems necessary for your operations and created and stored backups separate from the rest of your environment. If you don’t keep separate backups, they can be compromised with the rest of your systems, defeating their purpose.
3. Vulnerability Exploits
Attackers leverage software flaws or weaknesses in your IT systems. These exploits are not damaging on their own, but they cause system interactions that attackers can use as a foothold for more destruction.
Solution: Conduct regular external and internal vulnerability scans. These scans will identify exploitable systems so that you can remediate your critical vulnerabilities.
4. Credential Theft
This attack involves impersonating you by logging into your systems using your credentials to access protected data or phish your contacts. Unfortunately, it’s common for people to use their corporate credentials on random third-party sites. If one of those sites has a data breach, credentials that give access to your environment can be easily bought and sold on the dark web.
Solution: Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is your primary protection from unauthorized account access. Upon logging in, MFA will require that the person proves they are who they say they are by sending a code to something that only that person has access to. In addition to MFA, promote proper password hygiene, so your people don’t use their corporate credentials on third-party sites.
Cyberthreats are on the rise and becoming increasingly hard to identify on your own. Are you looking to lessen your risk of falling victim to a cyberattack? Visit our IT Security page to learn how we can help.