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Top Three Cyber Threats in 2020

The computer security industry is rapidly changing, with the goal of responding as quickly as possible to new types of threats. Specialists estimate that worldwide security spending will exceed USD 120 bn by 2025. These are the most dangerous cyber security threats of the year.

1. Social Hacking

If you run a business, it may be surprising to hear that your own employees may leak important company data to third parties. I am talking about people who click malicious links in emails, for example, without knowing that their actions lead to malware installs, and then to network takeovers.

To minimize risks, work with your network admin (or with a third-party network security specialist) to set proper network policies. By doing this, you will make sure that employees aren't allowed to access resources which shouldn't be available to them.

Train your employees, teaching them how to spot potential risks: attachments that come in emails from strangers, links sent by virtual "friends" through social networks, and so on.

Set proper bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies. Allowing employees to bring their own devices at work may sound fun, but introduces serious security risks. Yes, some studies show that BYOD can increase productivity, but the risks are too high.

2. Ransomware

Groups of cyber criminals target businesses and even government entities in larger and larger numbers through ransomware attacks. These pieces of malware are built with a single goal in mind: money extortion.

Everything starts with an innocent looking email link, which is clicked, and then downloads one or more malware applications on the infected computer. The virus spreads across the network, encrypting all the data that it can finds. Then, at the end of the process, it displays a text that asks for the ransom money, which must be paid to a bitcoin account.

To fend off these attacks, make sure to have top malware applications installed on all the computers. A dedicated server which scans the received emails before they reach your employees' inboxes is an even better option. By the way, we can help you implement this solution, in case that you need technical assistance.

Don't forget to keep a few different sets of backups for all the critical business data. For best results, store a copy locally, on an external hard drive that isn't connected to the network. Keep another copy in a cloud-based backup system. And make sure that all the ransomware is gone for good before attempting to restore the functionality of your network using a clean data copy.

3. DDoS attacks

Distributed denial of service attacks continue to pose a big threat to computer networks. And hackers have started to use them as smoke screens for other nefarious activities lately. While some companies have an in-house IT specialist, the truth is that you will probably need to use the services provided by a cyber security company to withstand a 10 Gbps DDoS attack.

At their core, these attacks are usually carried out by flooding the targets with lots of requests, overloading the system, and thus preventing legit requests from being fulfilled. Unfortunately, some hackers have created huge remote-controlled armies of devices which can flood the victims by sending requests from millions of vulnerable devices such as IP cameras, IoT gadgets, etc. Since these devices can be located anywhere in the world, it is virtually impossible to block all their IPs.

To be safe, you need to use application front-end hardware, which can be purchased from bandwidth management vendors, and analyzes the data packets before they reach the network, determining if a particular data packet is safe or not. Intrusion prevention systems are effective as well, and firewalls can block incoming traffic for specific ports and/or IP addresses.

As you can see, hackers have built powerful weapons which can damage your network permanently. So, choose to stay safe by working with a trustworthy security consultant today.