As companies strive to build secure businesses, they end up spending a significant portion of their workweek on security-related tasks, such as scan reviews, secrets detection and context-switching between multiple tools.
Moreover, sorting through false positives or duplicate vulnerabilities consumes an inordinate amount of an organization’s time, reducing the effectiveness of their cybersecurity solutions.
AI-powered automation and autonomous endpoint management work as a catalyst in bringing effectiveness and transforming your IT management. This blog discusses the various cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities and ways to defend against them. Keep reading to learn how to enhance your company’s own security posture.
The Ultimate Guide to Cybersecurity Threats & Defenses
Phishing Attacks: The Human Element at Risk
Attackers obtain sensitive information such as usernames or passwords by disguising themselves as trustworthy entities in an electronic communication to a fake email or website that mimics a reputable organization. It is usually associated with email fraud and has emerged as one of the most prominent cyberattacks today.
Why It’s a Major Threat:
According to the report1, the most widespread type of phishing scam in 2023 was bulk phishing, which affected around 86% of companies worldwide. In the first quarter alone of 2024, there were nearly one million unique phishing sites worldwide. Phishing attacks exploit human error to gain a foothold in corporate or governmental networks as part of a larger attack, such as an advanced persistent threat (APT) event. They bypass security perimeters, distribute malware inside a closed environment, or gain privileged access to secured data.
How to Defend Against It:
Preventing phishing scams primarily involves awareness. Proper employee training must be done to recognize phishing attempts. Businesses should also implement multi-factor authentication (MFA) to reduce risk. AI-based threat detection enterprise security solutions also implement spam filters to detect phishing emails. It verifies a site’s security before entering personal information to identify and block malicious emails.
Ransomware: The Growing Extortion Threat
A malicious software attack, commonly termed ransomware, threatens to access an organization’s data or perpetually blocks access to it unless a ransom is paid. It effectively locks users out of their systems, potentially crippling the entire network until the ransom is paid. Businesses pay ransom demands to gain access to their systems, spending much time and effort dealing with the aftermath.
Why It’s a Major Threat:
2023 marked the year with the highest volume of posts on shaming sites, where approximately 30% of posts were on newly identified DLS associated with various ransomware families, including ROYALLOCKER.BLACKSUIT, RHYSIDA, and REDBIKE. The threat actor searched internal resources, such as SharePoint drives, documentation, and emails, for specific information that could support their operations.
How to Defend Against It:
Maintaining regular and separate backups of your essential files helps you defend businesses against it. Businesses should also avoid clicking on suspicious links and keep all their software and systems up-to-date. An enterprise security solution that ensures continuous compliance enforcement will also help your organization remain secure and compliant.
Insider Threats: The Risk from Within and Data Breaches
A security risk originating from within the targeted organization, such as your employee or business associate, makes enterprise security important as they gain access to sensitive information or privileged accounts within the organization’s network and aim to misuse this access.
Why It’s a Major Threat:
Insider threats cause significant financial, reputational and operational damage as they already have legitimate access to an organization’s critical systems and data, making it harder to detect their harmful actions. Common misuses include abnormal data access, privilege escalation, unusual network traffic, employee behavior changes and unauthorized system modifications.
How to Defend Against It:
Implement least access privileges, limiting user and application access to the minimum resources and permissions needed to perform their tasks. Use real-time application security tools to monitor for potential threats. Multiple scans can be reviewed in centralized dashboards for illegal access, and security tasks can be easily shared between various team members, bringing greater efficiency. Secure enterprise also correlates results from various tools for more efficient triage and remediation.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attacks: Overwhelming Your Network Security Infrastructure
An attempt to disrupt a server, service, or entire network by overwhelming it with internet traffic, rendering the system/ network inaccessible to legitimate users, resulting in the denial of service from an organization. These attackers usually flood the system with requests or exploit vulnerabilities.
Why It’s a Major Threat:
Attackers can infiltrate a database and access sensitive information affecting business finance or reputation. They are often carried out using a botnet, a network of internet-connected devices that can also distract cybersecurity operations while other criminal activity is underway. These attacks are much more brutal to prevent or mitigate as they originate from different sources; however, you can take measures to minimize them.
How to Defend Against It:
To protect against DDoS assaults, organizations could adopt cloud-based content delivery networks (CDNs) and implement network security rules. A cybersecurity solution platform that automates the detection, administration, and real-time remediation of all endpoints on-premises, virtual or cloud will be helpful.
Advanced Persistent Threats: Long-Term Attacks
APT is a type of long-term cyberattack when a hacker enters a corporate network, creating an illegal, persistent presence to steal extremely sensitive data. It differs from traditional cyberattacks in several ways, such as complexity, persistence, targets, etc. For example, Operation Aurora, an APT attack in 2009, targeted Google, Adobe, Intel and other companies to steal intellectual property and gain insight into their operations.
Why It’s a Major Threat:
Executing an APT assault requires more resources than a standard web application attack, as perpetrators are usually teams of experienced cybercriminals with substantial financial backing. They’re not hit-and-run attacks, but once a network is infiltrated, the perpetrator remains to attain as much information as possible.
How to Defend Against It:
Proper APT detection and protection require a multifaceted approach from network administrators. Businesses must leverage unparalleled coverage, operational efficiency, and effective risk mitigation to safeguard their assets from pressing vulnerabilities. Application and domain whitelisting, traffic monitoring, and access control measures should be implemented. The AI cybersecurity platform automating discovery, management, and real-time remediation of all endpoints will be great.
Conclusion
Businesses face all kinds of cybersecurity threats. However, there are ways to mitigate every threat. Organizations can protect computer systems, networks, and data using a holistic cybersecurity solutions platform that protects devices, networks and digital assets from cyberattacks. It works as a single platform solution that provides a wide array of testing tools under a single umbrella, leaving room for no vulnerabilities. Additionally, when integrated with AI, it reduces the number of false positives in scan results, widens scan coverage, and assists with tool remediation. Doing so will provide centralized access to valuable, granular, real-time information about traffic on the edge of your corporate network perimeter and protect your business data and systems from malicious attacks and theft.
Read more:
The Top 5 Cybersecurity Threats and How to Defend Against Them