Threats and Applications: Protecting heritage has always been a priority for any organization throughout history, and this principle stands firm today.
In today’s highly connected and digital world, the assets of companies and the profile of hackers have changed significantly. Today, threats are more complex, and it is essential to have an effective defense acting in an integrated way with the risks existing in all environments to maintain fluid physical and digital protection operating. This is where companies specializing in cybersecurity make a difference for customers.
Although security needs are very particular to each Company, your solution can be challenging to apply internally. This is because today’s threats and applications are complex, with skilled actors investing time in targeting and planning their attacks. For resident IT teams, facing the new profile of hackers and cybercriminals is often an excessive challenge, whose success rate may be insufficient to keep the environment effectively safe. Thus, working with specialized providers in your information security journey is highly recommended and a choice increasingly adopted by companies from all segments.
Understanding The Challenge Ahead
According to studies by Accenture, the average cost of security incidents for large companies is around US$13 million, with an 11% increase in the volume of leaks in 2018 compared to the previous year. These figures show that investment in security can directly avoid financial losses for the Company and preserve its image and credibility in the market, a decisive factor for business continuity.
While the nature of threats varies, some hazards are more common and tend to form the basis for most attacks. As:
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Malware
Programs are installed without authorization on users’ machines for purposes that may include stealing credentials, spying, crashing the system, gaining remote control through Command & Control, and others. This is a classic threat, constantly updated and taking many forms.
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Ransomware
A specific type of malware that gained notoriety in 2017 in the form of Wanna Cry – which to this day remains one of the most used families of this type of program. It is based on the idea of blocking access to a system’s data, encrypting it, and demanding payment to gain access to it again.
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DDoS
Denial of service attacks takes down web servers, preventing the business from operating normally. These attacks are often based on botnets used to generate a massive volume of access to the target site, causing it to crash because it cannot manage these malicious accesses.
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Social Engineering
A threat strand combines digital techniques with real-world approaches, where criminals seek to impersonate legitimate interlocutors to manipulate their target into taking a specific action. Among these attacks are phishing (malicious emails with harmful links and attachments), BEC (corporate email compromise, where the criminal tries to impersonate someone in the Company, such as a director or CEO), and watering hole actions (where the criminals try to approach their victims in external environments such as social networks, forums, etc.).
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Exploitation Of Vulnerabilities
A dangerous attack vector is growing with the popularization of mobility, IoT, and edge computing. Here, hackers try to exploit native security flaws in systems or problems in configurations, which expose holes that are exploited for illegal access to the organization’s environment.
These threats and applications are a small sample of what criminals can accomplish and how they can use various technical and social resources to achieve their goals. Fortunately, companies specializing in security have the necessary answers to these challenges, and organizations adopting them have essential business advantages.
Allies For Cyber Security
To defeat cybercrime, it is necessary to have structured processes and skilled people that exploit the tools’ best performance, detect real-time threats, and respond to incidents in an agile way. According to IBM studies, the security approach within a Company’s operational process helps to mitigate risks and reduce the impact of incidents. That’s because a preventive posture helps to identify problems more quickly, fix flaws, and reduce vulnerabilities, directly affecting the ability of criminals to enter, move and modify data in the Company’s system.
As said, however, it is not simple for the internal IT team to provide all the security necessary for a Company to operate with peace of mind. The complexity of criminals’ actions, their degree of sophistication, and the current variety and accessibility of malicious tools mean that threat actors have many attack options. Comparatively, IT teams, who have to worry about the availability of infrastructure, support, and operational resources, do not have the training, staff, and time to face virtual dangers the way they need to. This leads to severe problems, which can harm or even make the business unfeasible.
Also Read: Benefits Of Investing In A Cybersecurity Culture?
