October 24, 2024
Running a business is risker than ever. Beside rising competition, you are facing an increasing number of cyber security threats to business website and IT infrastructures. What’s worse, as defensive services specialists at CyberFlow know, some of these threats come from within your organisation.
Let us present in detail the most frequent types of cyber security risks for businesses, so you have a clearer idea of what your company is facing:
- Phishing and Social Engineering
Phishing and social engineering are among the biggest cyber threats, because they can target several company employees at the same time. Using emails, texts and websites that appear to belong to genuine businesses, official government authorities and institutions, hackers try to determine your employees to disclose proprietary business data or confidential information.
In some cases, these emails and texts contain malicious attachments or links which infect the IT infrastructure with malware and steal data from servers and computers.
- Malware
As noted above, malware (short for malicious software) represents code written specifically to give hackers unauthorised access to IT systems. Once infiltrated in the system, malware steals data or damages computers and networks.
In some cases, malware will propagate itself by sending malicious emails and messages to others, without the user’s knowledge. In other cases, it encrypts data on a computer or server, and the hacker demands an amount of money to remove the encryption or refrain from publishing confidential data. This last and more recent type of cyber threat to business is called ransomware.
- The Biggest Cyber Threats from Inside: Weak Passwords
According to the World Economic Forum, 123456 is the most common online password in the world. It is followed by other weak passwords such as:
- Admin
- Password
- ********* (yes, just the asterisk symbol)
- 111111
Why are these passwords weak? Because they are extremely easy to guess. In fact, it takes hackers less than a second to crack any of them and gain access to IT systems.
- 4. DDoS
The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is one of the most crippling types of cyber attacks on businesses that operate online stores. The hackers overwhelm the website with artificial traffic, until it exceeds maximum capacity and it becomes inaccessible to legitimate users.
An effective way of preventing this cyber risk is choosing a reliable managed security service that offers secure hosting. CyberFlow invests in the best built-in DDoS protection for hosting servers, blocking the hackers’ attempts to take down your website.
- 5. Late Software Updates
Postponing software updates is one of the most serious cyber security risks for businesses. These updates often contain solutions (called patches) to known vulnerabilities. Without these patches, the software solutions your employees use can be easily exploited by hackers.
Through vulnerability assessments, specialists can identify all the software products that require immediate updates, as well as the ones who are obsolete and should be replaced with more recent products.
- 6. Insider Threats
As we stated at the beginning of this article, some of the cyber threats for small business owners come from their own team. Some employees may try to make extra money by selling your confidential data to competitors or wilfully infecting your IT system with malware.
These attacks are difficult to prevent, because the perpetrators already have access to your company’s IT system, using legitimate credentials.
- 7. SQL Injection
This type of cyber attack targets databases. The hacker introduces malicious code into an input field (such as a contact form) on a website in order to execute a specific query on the database. This query usually involves:
- Deleting data
- Changing data
- Taking control over the database.
In the worst case scenarios, the entire IT system can be compromised, requiring full backup of all data.
CyberFlow Can Protect Your Business from the Biggest Cyber Threats
Data are among the most valuable assets for any business. Thus, you should invest in the best cybersecurity solutions to keep them safe from hackers.
Cyberflow offers a comprehensive range of services, from ethical hacking to 24/7 monitoring of your IT systems and networks. We have years of experience and a dedicated team of certified specialists.
Reach out to us for a personalised offer!