Are You Prepared for This Year’s Top Cybersecurity Threats?

One of the greatest threats to any business or government organization today is cybercrime. The threat level also continues to grow exponentially as companies embrace digital transformation.

Research suggests that the global damage caused by ransomware attacks will cost more than $11.5 billion annually by 2019. This makes it important for IT leaders to approach digitization with security at the forefront of their minds.

It’s critical as an attack can quickly have a significant impact on both the brand and shareholder value. In fact, a data breach similar to the one that happened last year at Equifax can end up being the costliest breach in corporate history.

Keeping this in mind, how prepared is your business for present and emerging cybersecurity threats?

To be adequately prepared for today’s dominant cyber threats, we at Digi117 believe that companies need to brace themselves for the following and more:

Internet of Things (IoT) vulnerabilities
Crime-as-a-Service (CaaS)
Weaknesses in the cloud
More ransomware attacks

IoT Vulnerabilities

IoT is going through a period of accelerated adoption across industries. This, in turn, will create an environment where enterprise networks are crowded with vulnerable smart technology.

Whether they’re medical devices, logistics related sensors, inventory control, or manufacturing systems, businesses will need to take a proactive approach to minimize the threat from what’s now a highly attractive target for bad actors.

This is because most IoT devices in the marketplace weren’t designed with security in mind. Furthermore, the lack of memory, firmware, and the fact that they have their own boxed in operating systems makes it impossible to install a reliable security tool.

So when IT leaders make purchase decision to cut costs and enhance efficiency, it will be critical to make these choices based on security.

Crime-as-a-Service (CaaS)

In recent years almost all software companies across the planet have adopted an “as-a-service” business model. The bad news is that the criminal world has also seen the benefits of such an approach and followed their example.

Today, things like a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is available to just about anyone as a service. While many may associate the targets of these attacks with corporate behemoths like Amazon or Google, the reality is completely different. The prime target of DDoS attacks in 2018 will be small businesses.

So it’s important for IT teams to ensure that they’re up to date with the latest exploit kits and phishing kits so that they can prepare to respond to these threats effectively. Are-you-prepared-for-these-year's-cyber-security-threats

Weaknesses in the Cloud

Whether your business is working in a private, public, or hybrid cloud, you have to accept that fact that your business could be a potential target. With so much sensitive data moving to the cloud, IT teams need to be in the proper frame of mind to secure all valuable business data.

The responsibility of keeping all data secure will always come down to the business, not the cloud service provider.

This makes it critical for any business moving workloads to the cloud to first ascertain if the business is ready to respond to the following threats and more:

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and insecure interfaces
Data breaches
Account or service hijacking
DDoS attack

Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS)

Over the last couple of years, ransomware attacks quickly became the norm. From WannaCry to Petya to NotPetya, both commercial enterprises and government institutions were brought down to their knees (and had to contend with significant downtime).

With RaaS also becoming popular in recent months, you can expect more bad actors without any technical training to also launch their own ransomware attacks this year. This makes it important to identify and secure all endpoints.

According to research, 77% of ransomware attacks that were able to successfully compromise organizations utilized fileless techniques in 2017. This year, a third of all ransomware attacks are also expected to use this same technique.

While the ransom itself might not be much, the costs related to downtime can be enormous and can have a significant impact on the business’ brand value.

All of the above makes it important for enterprise IT teams to stay on top of evolving cybersecurity threats and adapt to it accordingly. This means that there’s no one-size-fits-all type of solution that will effectively protect your business from these rapidly growing security threats.

As a result, businesses need to conduct an extensive security audit to determine if they’re ready for all present and future cybersecurity threats.

The audit might lead you to supplement your antivirus program or it might force you to change your cloud service provider because they just don’t fit your specific standards. But regardless of the outcome, conducting a cybersecurity audit and making appropriate changes will be vital going forward.

As the stakes are higher than ever before, it’s important to not only stake steps to protect personal information and corporate secrets, but also the critical infrastructure that keeps your business online (and your brand image intact).