Something That’s Incredibly Relevant
Cyber attacks can actually cripple economies. A Distributed Denial of Service attack, or DDoS, can take down an entire region of corporations. In fact, this has happened in the United States.
DDoS attacks happen when viruses piggyback from 3rd-party apps, being activated remotely by cybercriminals when saturation reaches a certain threshold. Essentially, DDoS attacks are when servers are bombarded by so many access requests that they crash.
Hackers can carefully design such attacks to target large or small businesses, and their reasoning may be abstruse enough to be beyond prediction. This is one serious threat for which businesses need to develop advanced policy in terms of prevention.
There are many others; multiple textbooks would be required to describe them all in detail. Accordingly, here we’ll briefly go over four common ones to help you figure out your best moves as regards IT security for your business. Contact tech consultants to round out your security profile overall.
1. Employee Training: Staff Can Be A Risk
Staff and ex-staff are, directly or indirectly, some of the most dangerous cyber threats. Passwords tend to be a huge vector for hackers either through brute-force attempts, or predictive hacking. A lot of people choose basic, easy-to-predict passwords.
Beyond poor password protocols, employees often do things they shouldn’t do online, which exposes your network to viruses. It’s not always that they’re trying to do anything unprofessional, either. Sometimes certain scam sites look quite legitimate and may be encountered during the course of regular duties.
Also, email is a common vector for ransomware, and that is through “phishing”, wherein hackers pretend to be management requesting information or resources. The solution to all three of these things—passwords, web use, and email security—is training and policy development as informed by tech-savvy consultation.
2. Ransomware: Be Sure to Have Backups
The kryptonite of ransomware is backup and failover protection. Also, compartmentalize network data so that important information is sequestered from general operational data. So long as you backup your data continually in multiple locations (at least three, on multiple media types, with some backups not being located at primary work-sites), you can recover.
Essentially, if your data is held hostage for some sort of cryptocurrency ransom, all you need to do is boot from an earlier “image”; one before the virus got onto the system. Work can be lost, but compartmentalization minimizes such losses.
3. Hidden Threats Only Pen-Tests Reveal
A “penetration test”, or pen test, is when a tech company probes the totality of your digital infrastructure to identify and correct “holes” in security. Digital transformation solutions such as DMI can be key in helping reveal operational vulnerabilities. When you know where you’ve got a blind spot, you can take proactive corrective measures prior cyber attack.
4. General Malware or Spyware and Lags
Malware like adware is benign enough, but it will choke your system with unnecessary data that reduces expedient, optimum business functionality. Your employees won’t be able to get as much done as they could because the system will lag more than it would otherwise.
Spyware is another story. It can reveal carefully-guarded secrets to competitors. Also, it may not be competitive spyware; it could have some sort of surveillance aspect. Depending on your business, you want to be aware of this threat.
Protecting Your Business From Ever-Present Cyber Crime
Malware, spyware, associated lagging from infections of such viral software, hidden tech vulnerabilities that need to be discovered, ransomware, and employee error represent some of the most common tech threats modern businesses tend to encounter.
Beyond employee training, policy design, tech options like firewalls, and backups, it’s worthwhile to find tech professionals you trust who can inform you as regards security.
Cybercrime is a feature of the modern world, and its economy rivals “white hat” tech. As general tech advances, so also does cybercrime. Security is, as a result, continuously paramount.