Are These Cyber Attacks on Your IT Team’s Watch List?

Cyber attacks. They are every IT team’s daily nemesis and, some days, raison d’etre. No matter your size or type of business, you have to prepare for breaches to your computer system.

Bad actors who gain access to your company’s system to steal data or alter or destroy information could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours of public relations cleanup.

So, what are the most concerning kinds of cyber attacks facing businesses today? In this post, we’ll explain what we consider to be the top ten threats that should be on your IT team’s radar.

Malware

Malware, the most common and well-known type of cyber attack, is short for “malicious software” aimed at stealing, corrupting, or destroying your company’s confidential information. It might do so through data mining, searching for account passwords, decrypting files, or allowing other hackers access to your networks. Examples include spyware, worms, adware, trojans, and ransomware.

Ransomware

This is a type of malware that deserves a standalone description. As its name implies, ransomware essentially involves using malware to hold your system hostage and demand a fee, often in cryptocurrency, to restore functioning. Your system might be infected through unpatched vulnerabilities, policy misconfigurations, or through links included in phishing emails.

You’re likely familiar with phishing, which involves using social engineering tactics, text messages, social media, and emails to manipulate victims into sharing information or downloading malware. Pay special attention to the type of phishing referred to as whaling. Whaling specifically targets C-level executives with the goal of stealing information or money or breaking into their devices.

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attacks

This brand of cyber attack isn’t designed to steal money or information but rather to make your system crash, potentially crippling operations and harming your company’s reputation. When cyber attackers overwhelm your servers with traffic, it may be impossible for your users to access their online accounts, websites, applications, or email accounts.

SQL Injection

This type of cyber attack can make a business feel like they’ve been caught with their pants down. Criminals look for any vulnerabilities in your company’s website in order to get in and inject malicious SQL code. From here, they can manipulate your database and access private or sensitive information. This could include customer details, company data, financial records, and user lists.

Identity Theft

ID theft is a more difficult-to-detect type of cyber attack. It occurs when a cyber imposter steals user credentials to masquerade as those users to gain access to information and accounts. Examples include credential harvesting, government impersonation, credential stuffing, and Man-in-the-Middle Attacks. Let’s look more closely at the last two.

Credential Stuffing

When bad actors use automated tools to try out hundreds of thousands of username and password combinations, all it takes is one successful guess to gain access to your company’s systems. Once in, an intruder can wreak havoc on your privacy and that of your users, likely causing a public relations nightmare.

Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) Attacks

If you’re picturing an interloper standing in the way of two trusted parties, you’ve got the right idea. Those two entities could be you and your partners or customers. When you exchange sensitive data, this “man in the middle” acts like a cornerback intercepting a pass on the football field. Once they’ve got the ball, it’s game over for your trusted information trade, and game on for fraud, espionage, or theft.

Insider Threats and Copyright Infringement

Perhaps the most challenging cyber threat to pinpoint is one that doesn’t involve a complex technological attack but rather a human one. All the preventive measures in your IT team’s toolkit won’t necessarily stop an employee or contractor from going rogue. Insiders can sabotage you, perhaps through stealing your trade secrets or passing your intellectual property off as their own. While not bulletproof, there are actions you can take to protect your business.

Spoofing

Users who don’t look closely enough at a sender’s email address or a website domain might find themselves the victims of Domain Name Service (DNS) or Email Spoofing. They might navigate to or click on a website that looks just like one they trust without noticing a minor change in its spelling – perhaps one wrong or extra letter or number. Or they might take action in an email that appears to come from a trusted source without double-checking the actual email address it came from. From here, a spoofer can extort money, install software, and steal information.

Zero-Day Exploits

Lastly, there is the threat that you aren’t even aware of yet. That’s the software vulnerability your developer or IT team hasn’t yet discovered or acquired a patch for. A Zero-Day Exploit is one that isn’t yet public, but it will soon be once there’s a major data breach or system compromise. You just hope it isn’t your company that exposes it to the world.

What Is Your Cyber Attack Shield Made Of?

As you can see, there’s no limit to the creativity of a cyber attacker’s thinking, and much overlap between the strategies they use to gain unauthorized access to companies’ and customers’ data.

Increasingly complex strategies, coupled with the trend toward home-based work (increasing the number of hackers’ access points), call for dedicated and forward-thinking professional protection. Total Data Migration keeps your enterprise secure, trusted, and operational. Call us today at 800-460-7599, or contact us online to schedule a no-obligation consultation.