Voodle Staff Cybersecurity is undoubtedly one of the most persistent threats for businesses. One of the most important news organizations in the world, CNBC, has called it “the greatest threat to the world economy.” The malicious Android apps and ransomware become ever more destructive, while machine learning and poorly configured cloud lend alongside new dangerous attacks. Startup businesses always come up with great business startup ideas but cybersecurity threats scan impact any organization or business. Given the relevance of the subject, let’s see together what will be the biggest cyber threats for business startups security.
5 Business Security Threads
1: Cryptojacking
In recent years, ransomware was the real protagonist among malware, but crypto-jacking is starting to carve out a respectable place in the world of cybercrime. Cryptojacking is an attack that does not aim to destroy vulnerable systems but to exploit their resources to generate cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (bitcoin is a digital currency that allows people to transact money through Blockchain technology). Cryptojacking has an advantage over conventional malware. The mining process runs in the background without mobilizing all the resources of the infected machine. As far as businesses are concerned, miners make their networks vulnerable to downtime and increase CPU usage, which creates additional costs. The code is introduced via e-mail attachments, just like traditional viruses and ransomware. However, it’s not your money they’re looking for; it’s your processing power and other resources that are being hijacked.
2: Social Engineering
It is a strategy with which cybercriminals collect innumerable information about organizations, their employees, and individuals, for example, through the web and social networks, or by sending absolutely credible messages to steal user data.
3: Sophisticated Phishing Attacks
People began to recognize threats, so hackers got organized to use AI and create highly personalized e-mails that could fool anyone. For instance, users receive an e-mail with the message, “You won 1 million dollars, “CLICK HERE,” etc.
Although phishing is an old trick, unfortunately, there are still many who fall victim to it. These are always e-mail, SMS, or other messages, which bear the counterfeit logo of a credit institution or an e-commerce company. They always invite the recipient to provide confidential data, such as a credit card number or login credentials.
Last year, the percentage of phishing messages among incoming e-mails increased by 250% and the trend does not seem destined to change in the near future. To avoid bombshells, do not click on this type of message, a bank will never ask you to provide your credentials via e-mail. Also, if you recklessly click on a link, check carefully in the browser bar that you are not finished on an impersonator address.
4: Internet of Things (IoT)
The development, by number, and by average power, of smart devices connected to the Internet will continue in 2020, increasing the risks for the community. From the Report “DDoS attacks in Q3 2019,” Kaspersky Lab shows that, in the last quarter of 2019, the DDoS attacks increased by 32% compared to the same period in 2018.
This type of attack involves the infection of a large number of computers, which are transformed into “zombies.” and aggregated into a botnet from which a joint attack is then launched against a site or server, to make it collapse. Unfortunately, even small and simple IoT devices have a processor, RAM, and an Internet connection, which proposes them to become the zombies of choice for DDoS attacks. The 5G connection will also allow you to generate significantly more traffic during attacks.
5: Ransomware
To date, ransomware has limited itself to infecting PCs and smartphones to encrypt all data and ask for an economic ransom to decrypt them. The latest trend, however, is to send part or all of this data to a server, then resell it on the Dark Web and earn a second time. Or raise the price of the ransom if the data is that of a company, and the threat is to sell it to a competitor. Also, from the business security point of view, there is an increasingly frequent attempt to encrypt not only individual machines but the entire networks.
Despite the success of ransomware – some have even compromised the infrastructure of entire organizations – there are relatively simple ways to prevent it from causing too much damage. To begin, organizations must ensure that all systems and software on the network have successfully integrated the latest security software updates. This parameter plays a lot in preventing this type of attack, most of which is based on the exploitation of known business security systems’ vulnerabilities. It is also necessary to ensure that there is no default password used on the network and to use two-factor authentication as much as possible.
Conclusion
Cybersecurity is no longer tied to internal, or IT concerns. All business sectors may be of interest to what is certainly one of the most important threats of the future (and, we can guarantee you, also of the present). However, there are more modern attack techniques that are catching on, but it is possible to better combat cyber security threats due to the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Also, you can contact the cyber security companies to prevent your business from these threats.
