Cybersecurity threats against enterprise businesses, particularly sophisticated and high-value ransomware attacks, are growing more prevalent by the day…and largely originate from within Russia. Below is a breakdown of 2022’s most frequently targeted channels for cybersecurity threats against enterprise businesses.
Fueled by more powerful tools, anonymous and untraceable forms of payment, and global instability, cyber threats are globally on the rise. Cryptocurrency has made transaction anonymity easier than ever, providing a financial infrastructure for an entire economy of cybercrime. The Covid-19 pandemic saw one of the biggest spikes in cybercrime in recent history, with a 148% reported increase year over year.
Russian is quite often the perpetrator. Just this year, the BBC reported that 74% of all ransomware attacks could be traced to Russian-backed hackers. Now politically motivated by the recent war in Ukraine, cybercrime is once more on the rise and is becoming increasingly adaptive and lucrative for hackers.
Enterprise companies across the nation have spent the last 2 years either initiating or accelerating their remote workforce transformations, and more than ever, these new and more work-vulnerable environments are being exploited by bad actors.
These events, however, are only the most recent and headline-grabbing cyber threats to enterprise businesses in 2022. As cyber risk management struggles to keep up with the proliferation and severity of online threats, it’s no longer acceptable not to have cyber protections in place, especially in the eyes of strained insurance providers.
The scope of consequences that stem from cybersecurity attacks is almost too broad to gauge – loss of reputation, loss of customer trust, and loss of money. That’s why, at the bare minimum, your business needs to have the below protections in place to avoid being a sitting duck for bad actors everywhere.
It’s up to business leaders to prioritize cyber protection initiatives, install the most up-to-date security infrastructure, and ensure employees remain diligent and maintain every critical protocol.
Below is a breakdown of 2022’s most frequently targeted “weak points” that threaten the integrity of enterprise businesses.
By far the most frequently exploited channel for modern cyberattacks, email is a critical channel to protect your entire business, especially as workforces increasingly transition to remote or hybrid work environments that are more reliant on external access.
Email threats come in all shapes and sizes, but some of the most prevalent examples facing enterprise businesses are scams, phishing, “whaling” (or high-value phishing), malware, and suspicious links, among other threats that can be attached to or hidden within emails.
Implementing a dedicated email security application that can protect from broad stoke attacks and filter out incoming threats is crucial. Nowhere is this more imperative than in remote work environments, where emails can be accessed on mobile devices connected to low-security home networks or extremely vulnerable public networks.
This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many small to medium size businesses lack even baseline cybersecurity. Malware, an abbreviation of “malicious software,” is an umbrella term that encompasses a long list of threats. Some variations work quickly to delete files or corrupt data, while others can lie dormant for long periods of time and quietly allow hackers a back door into your systems.
The best antivirus software will monitor network traffic in real-time, scan activity log files for signs of suspicious behavior or long-term patterns, and offer threat remediation capabilities.
Below are some of the most common threats they’ll protect you against:
Ransomware, as the name suggests, holds critical files ransom by encrypting them and forcing users to pay for their decryption. Widely considered one of the more lucrative forms of malware, ransomware has been devastating to larger organizations. Some high-profile cases have cost companies well into the millions.
Spyware has a number of uses — be it to steal login credentials or to monitor someone’s activity — but always allows the culprit to access their victim’s keystrokes, passwords, or other sensitive data on their computing device.
Rootkits and boot kits are the most advanced of the common malware, lying at the lowest levels of a computer’s operating software to stay hidden from traditional scanners or antivirus protections. Bootkits reside so deeply embedded within a computing device that they’re functional even before a computer’s operating system is.
Lastly, there are Bots that allow criminals remote access and control of computers for DDoS attacks on sites and systems. At the largest scale, this can number to thousands of computers being hacked and controlled simultaneously.
Each of these common malware types is characterized by how they spread. Viruses insert their own code into programs, worms exploit software flaws to spread, trojan horses trick users into installing malware themselves by posturing as legitimate software, and fileless malware exploits bugs or uses built-in tools to reside in computing devices without leaving any traces.
Responsible for over 90% of all malware transmission, email is by far the most common distribution method, however, some more sophisticated types of malware can still spread without any user interaction.
Managing which users have access to which parts of your network is critical in ensuring that sensitive data remains protected. Your business should be leveraging security policies to restrict network access to only pre-approved users and devices. It’s possible to provide limited access to noncompliant devices or guest users, but this should be used only when necessary and with caution.
Open permissions leave wider gaps for hackers to exploit, so your user restrictions need to be as tight as possible.
Enabling users with frictionless and highly-secure network access will help ensure they have no need to deviate from protocols and stay within the safe confines of your secured work environment. Another way to stay ahead is to perform regular audits of any users with privileged access to scan for any unusual patterns of activity.
This is an essential proactive measure that can help detect threats before it’s too late and leads right into the next topic.
In order to recognize abnormal user behavior, first define what constitutes “normal” behavior around an everyday user’s job responsibilities, applications, and network. Dedicated analytical software is designed to identify abnormal behavior for you, but its success is dependent on the customer baselines that you’ve defined for it.
When done well, this is an easy way to proactively identify threats and isolate them before they inflict any damage.
Web security software is one of the most essential baseline protections any serious business needs to protect themselves from even common, broad-stroke threats. It not only prevents users from accessing vulnerable or at-risk websites that may contain malware, but it also defends against other web-based threats and protects web gateways from intrusion.
If the cost of cybersecurity is daunting to you and your business, keep this in mind: the cost of defense before an attack will always be less than the cost of repair after an attack. Invest in keeping critical data safe, workforce protected, and businesses operating at peak performance with a clean bill of cyber health.
Sources
https://techhq.com/2022/03/breaking-down-the-biggest-cybersecurity-threats-incoming-in-2022/
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/risk-and-resilience/our-insights/cybersecurity-trends-looking-over-the-horizon
