Cybersecurity threats to companies have gotten progressively worse in the last few years, as the digital space is filled with data thieves and all kinds of people who are looking to exploit businesses’ digital vulnerabilities. Unfortunately at this time, the bad guys have the upper hand, since many companies haven’t managed their digitization processes well, which were made necessary by the pandemic. In fact, according to researchers, over half of the businesses still haven’t mitigated any of the risks that digitization created for them. When this issue is paired with a shortage of cybersecurity experts, it creates a scary situation for everyone. Fortunately, companies can do plenty of things to improve their cybersecurity defenses and mitigate any potential risks. Many of these options are quite cost-effective.
Software
Most of the cyber attacks that happen around the world actually end up exploiting vulnerabilities inside software that the vendors already know about. The only reason bad actors can make these attacks is that businesses that utilize such software aren’t keeping it up to date. Just by updating every piece of software a company is using, it can instantly upgrade its cyber defenses. There are many tools that can help businesses figure out which software is out of date, or which security flaws it may have. With these tools, companies can update their software and ensure the safety of their data and operations.
Malware and Ransomware
Most experts agree that ransomware is the most pressing threat that businesses are facing these days. Ransomware is a type of malware designed to hold any data or business systems hostage, with very sophisticated encryption technology. When this malware breaches a business network, it proceeds to encrypt important data, and demands payment so that the company can regain access to its data. Unfortunately, ransomware threats never guarantee that payment is going to result in the release of the data. And according to research, about 80% of all businesses that pay to get their data back are then targeted a second time. While there is no certain way to deal with ransomware attacks, companies can use tools and software to search their data for any vulnerabilities. Then those vulnerabilities can be patched up with an update or additional security measures to prevent an attack.
DDoS Attacks
One of the common cyber attacks that companies face is bad actors using internet traffic to paralyze their systems or networks. This is known as a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS Attack), and while it’s not destructive, it tends to lead to hours of website or system outages for companies. Cybercriminals conduct these types of attacks by using thousands of other devices or computers that have been compromised and directing them to generate meaningless internet traffic toward a business. After a certain amount of time, the business will run out of resources to deal with the overwhelming amount of traffic, and go offline. Fortunately, there are platforms that can help companies identify such attacks by correlating multiple authentication failure events, which helps short-circuit the attack and stop it before it gets the chance to damage the system.