The term” cyber threat” refers to the risk posed by organizations and lone hackers who seek to breach an organization or individual’s systems. Cyber attackers can have many motives, including financial gain, data gathering, sabotage, and espionage.
Businesses lose millions of dollars each year due to cyber attacks that could have been avoided if only they’d taken the right precautions. If you’ve never taken cyber threats seriously or given them much thought, now might be the right time. Here are just a few of the many that could impact your business link outreach service.
Phishing Attacks
Even if you have a cloud-based disaster recovery plan in place, which would allow you to back up and retrieve your valuable data, it’s crucial to avoid falling for phishing attacks.
Phishing involves an attacker pretending to be an individual or organization you trust and encouraging you to click on a malicious link. Sometimes, they might even convince you to download a malicious file or hand over sensitive information. Of all breaches affecting organizations today, phishing attacks account for most of them, impacting small businesses more than large companies.
Malware Attacks
Hackers have been using advanced tools to make businesses of all sizes fall for cyber threats like viruses and trojans. These come under the umbrella term “malware” and involve hackers accessing your networks, destroying data, and even stealing it.
Typically, malware comes from spam emails, infected devices, and downloads from malicious websites. Data loss from malware attacks can be costly, particularly if your business doesn’t have a disaster recovery service that regularly backs up data in the cloud.
Compromised Passwords
Remembering passwords can be hard work. Indeed, most of us will forget at least one set of account login details throughout our lives.
It may seem easier and more convenient to set simple passwords you know you’ll remember, but this is one of the most common cyber threats affecting businesses in 2022. The rule to keep in mind is that if a password is easy for you to remember, it’ll be easy for criminals to hack. The answer to this conundrum is to use business password management technology and multi-factor authentication to provide an extra layer of safety.
Ransomware Attacks
Cyber attacks can be costly, but few are as expensive as ransomware attacks. These attacks involve hackers encrypting your data and holding it hostage until you provide them with what they want. Usually, they’re after a large ransom payment.
If you’re concerned about potential ransomware attacks, educate your staff about the importance of only downloading email attachments from verified web addresses, not giving out company information over email, and not giving personal information to unsolicited callers.
Insider Threats
Most people assume the biggest cyber threats come from people from outside your organization, but threats can also come from within. Insider threats can come from staff members or contractors who are able to access organizational data for espionage, sabotage, workplace violence, or unauthorized information disclosure. Insider threats can be both intentional and unintentional.
An intentional threat may arise when a disgruntled former employee shares sensitive company data. By contrast, an unintentional threat would essentially equate to carelessness. A staff member might, for example, create an accidental threat by sending confidential business information to the wrong person or opening a virus-containing link in an email.
Not all business owners give much thought to cyber threats, believing a cyber attack will never impact their business. However, they happen more often than you think. Take note of the threats above, and you’ll be in a much better position to mitigate the risks and keep your company data safe.