Top Cyber Threats to Organizations in the Modern World

In the current pandemic situation, more than 70% of employees in corporate sectors are working remotely from their homes. Working from home not only provides the flexibility to work comfortably but also increases the chances of becoming a victim of cyberattacks. Remote jobs open a whole lot of opportunities for cybercriminals as remote workers are easy targets for them. Compromising employees’ assets makes it easy for attackers to compromise corporate networks. Let’s learn the top cyber threats that affect organizations in the modern world.

How Remote Working Has Changed the Threat Landscape?

To enable business continuity and timely service delivery during the pandemic, organizations have adopted the work-from-home option throughout the world. This transition has brought many possibilities and challenges alike. Cybersecurity is one of the most important challenges that employers are facing these days.

Unlike a traditional office environment, securing mobile assets (BYOD devices) is not an easy task. Most employees who work from home use their personal devices to connect to corporate environments. It is relatively easier for IT teams to protect corporate environments from cyber threats due to having secure network boundaries. However, when employees use their own devices, the organization’s security is at risk as attack surfaces change.

Personal devices used by employees are not as secure as corporate devices and employees use their devices for browsing the Internet, watching videos, and accessing personal emails, thereby increasing the risk of downloading malware. Most personal devices employees use are not controlled or monitored by IT teams, which makes them more difficult to detect any threat in employees’ devices. All these factors make it hard for IT and security teams to maintain the same level of vigilance and security as they do in office environments.

With the rise of new, modified attacks and no proper cyber awareness, employees often do not know when they fall into the trap of cybercriminals. Cybercriminals use various forms of social engineering techniques to extract personal information (mostly using spam and phishing emails) and use that information to launch further attacks. Many organizations’ IT security posture does not have the required policies and infrastructure that support remote working, which increases the risk of cyberattacks.

Major Trends for Cyber Threats

Threat actors target organizations for various reasons, including damaging their reputations, making them suffer losses, personal gains, etc. However, we can categorize these cyber threats into the following attack trends:

• Disruption:- Business disruption is a prominent tool for cybercriminals to distract businesses, drain their time and money, and put them into miserable conditions. They can disrupt businesses via various means like planned internet outages that will disturb business operations and workforce productivity. As part of a business disruption strategy, they can even use ransomware attacks to hijack sensitive information and systems and demand a ransom in return.

• Distortion:- Cybercriminals can use bots and false information to distort businesses. They may confuse people about the integrity of information related to organizations or may even make them believe false information by impersonating the organizations. This makes it hard for businesses to maintain the trust of their customers. Also, they may distort technologies and data used by organizations.

• Deterioration:- If an organization does not have complete control over its business practices, it is vulnerable to various risks that could be exploited by attackers. For example, if the organization uses untested AI, it can lead to unexpected results and open doors to cyberattacks. Moreover, new surveillance laws that mandate organizations to be transparent cause them to lose control over the data and business practices, putting them at risk of exposing information to hackers.

Top Cyber Threats to Organizations

Out of multiple cyber threats, we are highlighting the top ones that are more prevalent and dangerous.

Phishing Attacks

These types of attacks have been on the rise recently. Phishing involves tricking users into accessing malicious emails and clicking on malicious links or downloading harmful attachments that can compromise the users’ device security. As per the ‘Cisco-2021 Cybersecurity threats trends’ study, 86% of organizations reported that their employees were exposed to phishing attacks.

Phishing is of various forms such as email phishing, SMS phishing, and voice phishing. Attackers use email phishing to collect personal information by directing users to fake websites and making them download harmful attachments containing malware. In SMS phishing, attackers send malicious links that ask for personal and/or financial information on an urgent basis. Vishing involves collecting personally identifiable information on call by impersonating legitimate organizations/individuals. Attackers impersonate legitimate users/institutions and offer lucrative deals/opportunities in all phishing attempts.

Data Breaches

Data breaches refer to unauthorized access to confidential data by bypassing security controls implemented by data owners. The confidential data can be customer information, credit or debit card details, email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, etc. As per the Identity Theft Resource Centre (ITRC)’s data breach analysis, data breach incidents increased by 38% during the second quarter of 2021 in the US.

Attackers may use network attacks or point-of-sale systems to perform data breaches. They first identify security weaknesses in an organization’s security system and then exploit them to control or access the system. Attackers often send the organization’s employees spam emails containing malware which gets downloaded when clicked, providing attackers unauthorized access to the system. If organizations fail to secure their systems from breaches, they will lose their business and reputation as well as get penalized with fines and lawsuits.

Malware

Malicious software, also known as malware, controls the target devices by either slowing them down or stopping them. Malware infects systems with various kinds of agents like viruses, ransomware, worms, adware, spyware, etc. Over the last year, it was observed that organizations encountered 35% of new malware types which were not known earlier. This percentage is estimated to increase as we continue to work remotely.

Attackers insert malware through phishing email attachments, pop-up ads, infected links received from unsolicited sources, etc. Once the malware gets itself installed on the system, it allows attackers to control or perform unauthorized actions on the system like accessing confidential files and sensitive data present on the system. Not having cyber awareness is the main reason behind the increase in malware attacks because employees unintentionally click on malicious links and pose a threat to their organizations as they connect to corporate networks remotely.

Ransomware

It is a form of malware that encrypts the files and data on the target systems once it gets installed. This makes the files and data no longer accessible to the owner. Usually, such malware is installed to demand a ransom from the victim for decrypting the encrypted files and data. During the pandemic, many organizations have suffered ransomware attacks (e.g., Accenture suffered a LockBit ransomware attack) which resulted in their loss of revenue. It is reported that at least 58% of US companies were affected by ransomware attacks in recent times.

Ransomware is spread via malicious downloads from phishing emails. Attackers extort money from large companies via ransomware. They often demand ransom payment via Bitcoins. However, they can request other payment methods like gift cards. Unless the requested ransom is paid by the victim organization, attackers won’t allow them to access encrypted files and data. To know how you can secure your information systems, read “How to deal with ransomware virus“.

Compromised Passwords

Attackers often create a fake website, a website that resembles the legitimate one, to trick users into entering their user credentials. Once a user enters their credentials thinking that it is a legitimate site, the attackers get their credentials, resulting in password compromise.

Also, passwords are compromised when users utilize common usernames and passwords for all their online accounts, making them vulnerable to password breaches. Studies show that 51% of people use the same passwords across multiple accounts, which makes the work of hackers easier. Not following strong password policies becomes the main cause of compromised passwords.

Cloud Jacking

Cloud jacking refers to the unauthorized infiltration of attackers into an organization’s cloud environment. Attackers compromise cloud security and get into the corporate environment to perform malicious actions or take control of the complete cloud. They may upload fake documents to the cloud asking employees, as part of phishing schemes, to transfer money, download malicious files, or perform other harmful actions. These actions can result in providing them with further access to enterprise resources and exposing sensitive data.

Similar information can be found in various news articles published in security blogs, news portals, and magazines.

A Few Security Measures to Stay Safe

Organizations must adopt security measures to protect themselves and combat cyber threats. Below are some measures that can help them stay safe:

Hire the right people

It is not easy for organizations to find the right talent, but when it comes to cybersecurity, it matters the most. Hiring cybersecurity professionals is necessary for organizations to ensure appropriate security. Since it is difficult for small and medium businesses to hire a full-time cybersecurity team for this purpose, they can opt for outsourcing the task of ensuring cybersecurity to vendors. By outsourcing cybersecurity tasks, they can get round-the-clock monitoring for threats as well as get expert guidance on the ever-evolving threat landscape.

Educate the team

Educate employees on vital cybersecurity practices such as how to handle customer data, the significance of strong passwords, how to use a secure network safely, etc. Ensure that they can identify and avoid phishing attacks by exercising caution when handling unsolicited emails, messages, and calls. Instruct them not to click on any suspicious links and download attachments that come inside emails and messages from unknown sources.

Develop a cybersecurity policy

Develop a strong cybersecurity policy. Organizations must ensure that their cybersecurity policies are updated to cater to the latest cyber threats and made available to all employees so that they can be well-versed with the policies and implement them in all cases. Also, the policy must include important security basic guidelines on protecting systems. This includes applying patches, encryption, and updating browsers, OS, & software, implementing multi-factor authentication, and data protection.

Wrapping up

Organizations must focus on the above-mentioned security best practices as their security baseline and add other necessary security measures as per their business requirements and affordability.  The key to preventing cyber threats is to know how cyber threats impact your business and what measures you can implement to avoid them or minimize the impact caused by them.