The
Risks
Most businesses including SMBs extensively depend on global digitalization for their company growth. As their IT structure develops into more complex, interconnected and handles more data, the exposure of gaps in the business’ security system becomes much broader.
What kind of information hackers
are looking for ?
Employees and customer’s data, bank account information and access to the business’s finances, and intellectual property. What can they do with the information? The cybercrime activities involved include:
Data Ransom
In many cases, hackers want to steal your data so that they can hold it for ransom. Ransomware attacks are one of the fastest-growing types of cyber-incidents and cases are increasing every year. Predictions are that these attacks against businesses will occur every 11 seconds and the global cost associated with ransomware recovery will exceed $20 billion in the next 12 months.
Identify Theft
Some data breaches are designed to steal personal information. Attackers can then exploit that information to break into other accounts, attempt to steal identities and so on.
Stealing Infrastructure
One of the most expensive assets of a company are its servers and storage arrays. Some hackers want to break into your systems so that they can store data and host malicious applications on your infrastructure, instead of paying for their own.
Just Because
Unfortunately, some attackers want to steal your data just to prove that they can do so! They are not motivated by monetary gain, access to free resources or the ability to steal your users’ identities. They simply want to prove to themselves – and their hacker friends, perhaps – that they can break past your defenses.
CYBERTHREAT
DUE TO
COVID-19
TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE PANDEMIC
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, several incidences and cases of cybercrime were observed across industries. Using malicious domain names registered with names such as “COVID-19” or “Coronavirus,” cybercrime increasingly targets every part of the demographics that search information related to COVID-19.
According to the Palo Alto Networks, at the end of March 2020, around 40,261 suspicious registered domain names were identified. Additionally, in recent times the use of identical business email addresses became the preferable choice for cyber attackers to conduct attacks.
REMOTE WORKING ENVIRONMENT
The global pandemic has forced the hands of businesses worldwide to allow their employees to work from home at unprecedented rates.
With the shift toward a remote working environment, cyber-threat risks increased among organizations along with the pressing concerns
of cyber-threat risk influence organizations to adopt solutions and configure malware protection, detection, and mitigation strategies
Using
third-party
Services
Another activity that increases businesses vulnerability is the rising trend among organizations to employ third-party vendors providing third-party data storage and cloud-based services at optimum costs. This have opened avenues for online attacks which previously did not exist
What does cybercrime activities include?
From Insider threats and data breaches to ransomware, advanced malware attacks, creation of misleading websites and phishing activities to obtain sensitive information and distributed denial of service attacks in facilities. All compromised the integrity of systems and disrupted the company’s daily working routine.
The General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR) is an EU-wide law that protects Europeans with regards to the processing of their personal data, as well as laying down the rules relating to the free movement of personal data. It was enforced in May
2018.
You might ask what an EU law has to do with you, if you and your website are based in the US?
The GDPR has extra-territorial scope, which means that websites outside of the EU that process data of people inside the EU are obligated to comply with the GDPR.
So, if you have a website in the US and you have visitors from the EU, the GDPR applies to your domain. Therefore, if that is the case, you need to meet the GDPR requirements and conditions for processing data. Failure of protecting consumer information can lead to a fine of up to 4% of the company revenue.