The cyber risk is increasing with every passing minute for every business arena. But the measures to protect these attacks are yet ignored by majority of the organizations. Accenture’s Cost of Cyber crime Study suggests that 45% of the cyber attacks are aimed at small and medium level business. However, the more alarming statistic is that not more than 14% of such businesses are yet ready to fight such attacks.
Cyber attacks have several faces such as DDoS, SQL injection, Spyware and more, but in every form it will act as a threat to your data, finance and reputation. In this blog, we are covering ins and outs of the most common cyber attack you must be wary of.
Before diving right inside the deep river of cyber attacks, let’s first learn what is a cyber attack?
What is a Cyber Attack?
Think about the crucial data your company’s database holds such as business' financial details, customers' financial details (For instance, the credit card data), sensitive personal data, customers' or staff email addresses and login credentials, Intellectual property, customer databases, clients lists, IT infrastructure and more. Now think about how much your competitors or a cyber criminal would be benefited if they gain access to it. Cyber attack is the same threat that just occurred in your mind.
To be precise, cyber attack is the attempt by a threat actor directed towards gaining unauthorized access to system with an intention to steal size or modify data. The motivation behind such attacks may vary. But in most of the cases it is to gain access to the fundamental assets (financial or non-financial) and exploit them or make money using them.
The attacker, in the cyber world, has many names such as threat actor, cyber criminal, hacker and a bad actor. These bad actors can be present inside your organization such as employees intentionally or unintentionally misplacing information and unauthorized access to critical system by an outsider, or outside the organization such as organized group of criminals and hackers.
5 most common types of Cyber Attacks
1. Malware
Malware is the acronym for the malicious software. Malware is the software designed in such as a way so as to interfere a system or computer’s regular functioning. It is the umbrella term that covers virus, worm, Trojan, spyware and many more. Malware typically result in providing access of an infected machine to the attacker, attacking the user’s local network and stealing highly sensitive data.
Malware prevention: tips and tricks
a. Install anti-virus software (for personal system) or firewall and end point security (for official systems.)
b. Update your software regularly.
c. Don’t buy apps from doubtful sources.
d. Back up your data regularly.
2. Ransomware
Ransomware is the criminal activity that makes use of malicious software to encrypt files on the user’s computer and demands for a ransom (money) to provide them the decryption key. Ransomware is advanced type of attack that puts organization where they could not access the files on their computers and paying ransom becomes the last and best option for them. The worst, however, is that in many cases paying ransom can also be ineffective and the victim cannot restore the data.
Ransomware Prevention: tips and tricks
a. Do not ignore the end point security.
b. Implementing EDR can work like a charm.
c. Monitor the network for suspicious activities.
d. Secure you Microsoft office apps.
3. DoS and DDoS Attacks
Denial of service and Distributed Denial of Service are the cyber attacks that can make the daydream of gaining service requests into nightmare of getting flooded with such requests but illegitimate, in such a way that the system’s resources gets exhausted.
In DoS attacks, the attackers attack the system with overwhelming number of service requests. As a result of which, the system cannot requests respond to valid or legitimate requests. The distributed denial of service attack is the same at the basic level; the only difference is that the attack, here, is launched from multiple host machines. The biggest ever DDoS attack was witnessed by Google in 2020.
DDOS prevention: Tips and techniques
1. Differentiate between normal and abnormal traffic.
2. Install high end network security.
3. Keep keen eyes on warning signals such as poor connectivity, slow performance and crashes and more.
4. Phishing and Social Engineering Attacks
Social Engineering attack is the umbrella term that covers all the attacks done by human interaction. The core essence of these attacks the psychological factors that can trick users to make security measures. The social engineering attacker tries to create a sense of urgency in the users mind so that a user barely checks if the website is legitimate or not. The most common type of social engineering attack is phishing attack.
The term phishing is inspired from the word ‘fishing’, as the attackers try fishing for the victim’s sensitive information using malicious links as bait. The concerning part of this attack is that the attacker reach directly to the email inbox, social media network and inboxes.
Think about the email with headlines like “Your account has been tempered; please update your password using this link”. This line has only one mistake. Your account is not tempered until you update your password using this link.
The link sent by the attacker is nearly identical to the legitimate link. Hence, it is a challenging task to notice the illegitimacy of the link.
5. SQL Injection attack
SQL is short for Structured Query Language is the malicious activity that takes advantage of database-depended websites. In this type of attack, the attacker act as a user and send infected query to the system instead of the data that is normally accepted by the server. For example a website asks for the username or password and in place of the user ID or password that attacker type in the infected command that you will unwittingly run on your database.
If the attacker succeeds in his virtue, you might end up losing access to your data or your data might get destroyed entirely.
VIBS