The year 2018 reported many incidents of cyber attacks and an estimated loss of over $ 1.8 billion. Hence simply put no organization safe these days from the cyber attacks. Data breach is the most common and has occurrence frequency very high; the hackers are looking for the websites that have a weak link to the organizations to compromise your client’s data and information. Hence it is really very important to protect your website, your data, your clients from these malicious hackers and ensure that all security measures are in place.
Types of attacks:
Social engineering attacks occur every day and can put the individuals, employees, organization, and clients at huge risks. Social engineering is a type of cyber attack that manipulates human interactions to gain unauthorized access to your organization. It targets your employees, from entry level to senior level hoping that they will unintentionally compromise your organization. Type of these attacks are as below:
- Phishing: it involves false communication, some deceptive type of conversation that is intended to compromise credential or inject malware. These attempts make the email look legitimate, but when you click on the embedded link or download the attachment, you compromise your system.
- Spear-Phishing: it is more targeted and customizes attack as compared to phishing. In this attack, the target will see their name, position, office number or some other personalized information in an email which tricks the prone thinking that it is a legitimate email.
- Whaling: When spear phisher targets C-level employees than it is considered as whaling. The main idea behind whaling is to attack the most senior level employees such that their executives do not participate in the same security training as other employees.
Many organizations such as LifeLock, SnapChat and Seagate have notable victims of social engineering attacks. Each of the organization quickly identifies a social engineering attack. Social engineering leverages the lack of awareness, inadequate security training, and informal usage policies.
Cybersecurity and Malware:
Malware is a type of cyber security attack that compromises systems through external software that is specially written to harm. Ransomware is a sophisticated malware, is the attack method that is very prominent. It primarily holds data hostage using encryption keys until the target pays the ransom. This type of malware attack exploits both human and technical weakness. Your organization could pay the ransom and recover the data, but the ransom is funding other cybersecurity attacks. Ransomware attacks that have made headline recently include:
- WannaCry: It results in more than 200,000 infections across 100 countries within the days using the leaked vulnerabilities found by the NSA.
- Petya: Global attack using the EternalBlue vulnerability in Microsoft Windows.
- NotPetya: Suspected as a state-sponsored attack that represents a weaponization of ransomware, traditional recovery vectors outside of backups and business continuity planning were mostly ineffective.
Denial of Service Attacks:
A Denial of Service(DoS) attack is a type of external intrusion used by malicious hackers to shut down the web servers of organizations- banking, commerce, government, and trade companies- by flooding or crashing them and exploiting vulnerabilities in their systems. A DDoS attack is a more extreme, complex form of DoS because hackers exploit the system from more than one locations.
These types of cybersecurity attacks prevent employees and other network users from using an organization’s system, causing organizations to lose time and money. Also, the DoS/DDoS attack doesn’t often result in the loss of sensitive information; hackers frequently request a ransom.
All these types of attacks pose major financial, organizational and reputational risks to all individuals regardless of the business size or a type of business.
