On many levels, the year 2020 has been a year of learning for businesses. The list of lessons learned has been extensive, ranging from enabling worldwide remote access almost instantly to migrating to cloud-based apps and infrastructure. None, however, has had quite the impact as the tremendous increase in malicious assaults on cloud and on-premise networks. If anything, the year 2020 has been marked by pandemics and large-scale, well publicised security breaches.
According to RiskBased, data breaches exposed approximately 36 billion records in the first half of 2020. According to Verizon, 45 percent of breaches were caused by hacking, 17 percent by malware, and 22 percent by phishing assaults. To put it another way, the demand for comprehensive cybersecurity planning and management has never been greater.
The financial cost of data breaches is simply the tip of the iceberg, according to IBM, which estimates the average cost to be over $3.86 million in 2020, with a lifecycle of roughly 280 days from detection to containment. Even a tiny breach can disclose sensitive information, putting users at risk of identity theft, financial loss, and ruining your company’s brand, as well as making you liable for compliance violations. IT Support Vermont, for example, may assist local businesses in adapting their technologies, processes, and policies to the rapidly evolving cyber-attack scene.
Cybersecurity risks will only continue to evolve, making them more difficult to detect and destroy. So, without further ado…,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Here is our list of 7 Cybersecurity Threats to Watch in 2021 for Enterprise IT:
Work-From-Home Attacks
Home environments are inherently less secure than corporate environments, and combining personal and business computing on personal devices can be disastrous for your company’s security. Attackers exploring for weak points of entry can gain simple access by targeting data centre or company personnel through their home networks. Companies are required to provide anywhere, anytime access to data because the majority of the workforce is projected to stay remote for the foreseeable future. Even though data is increasingly accessible, it is up to organisations to secure its security both in motion and at rest.
Fileless Attacks and Living Off the Land
Attacks that leverage the victim’s own computing environment, such as fileless attacks, are known as living off the land (LotL) attacks. This allows them to delete file-based payloads and create new files that can be readily traced and deleted. This is why fileless attacks are difficult to detect using traditional detection and prevention approaches like antivirus software.
The attacks usually start with sent links to malicious websites, where attackers utilise spoofing and social engineering to get access to users’ computers. System tools can be used by cybercriminals to get access to the system memory to extract and execute payloads.
Attacks That Originate in the Cloud
Do you believe traffic originating from your company’s cloud is safer than traffic originating from the Internet? Reconsider your position. Traditional ‘trusted sources,’ such as connections between your cloud apps and on-premise data repositories, are increasingly being targeted by hackers. Credentials may be exposed, resources for crypto mining may be stolen, and other issues may arise as a result of such breaches. Because cloud infrastructures are often outsourced, detecting and identifying intrusions on targeted on-premise systems takes time.
Supply Chain Attacks – One word – SolarWinds
Attacks on enterprise systems employing their own technology suppliers are here to stay for a while, thanks to the hack’s sheer success and publicity. This poses a variety of security risks for businesses, as closing supply chain loops is a time-consuming and difficult task that entails not only protecting their own infrastructure, but also ensuring total compliance and security in the environments of all software providers, technology suppliers, contractors, managed services vendors, and other third parties that feed into the system.
Mobile Device Attacks
We’ve seen an uptick in malware attacks on mobile devices, whether they’re delivered via app downloads, mobile websites, or the more traditional methods of phishing emails and text messages. Personal information, location data, financial data, passwords, and other sensitive information are commonly exposed as a result of these assaults.
Management Layer Attacks
The management layer is the holy grail of enterprise attack sites since it often grants attackers access to the entire system. The attacker’s decision to target the network management layer may have contributed to the SolarWinds hack’s success. This establishes a dangerous precedent for subsequent assaults, which might be directed at everything from enterprise batch environments to backup systems.
AI based Attack
Artificial intelligence, or AI, offers highly scalable systems that can be entirely automated and personalised to meet customers’ individual demands. Unfortunately, this also applies to the creation and spreading of malware. Attackers are beginning to shift away from traditional one-person attacks in order to employ artificial intelligence (AI) to automate phishing attempts by learning about their targets’ personal habits. AI can construct complex, nearly untraceable malware, phishing emails, exploitative software development kits, and new ways to penetrate corporate networks, among other things.
Another concerning trend of AI-powered attacks is deepfakes. Deepfakes often employ a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to modify existing footage (such as photos or video) into made-up circumstances, such as creating a seemingly authentic portrait of a person in a time and location where they have never been. Deepfakes may be used to penetrate frauds by creating synthetic identities, and many shady businesses are now offering deepfake-as-a-service.
Managing increasing security risks through 2021 and beyond is expected to be one of the most difficult business challenges facing companies around the world, and comprehensive cyber security policies must be at the forefront of all business decisions. After all, the best defence against malicious attacks is a strong offence, which generally costs a fraction of the enormous damages caused by data breaches and inability to protect sensitive information entrusted to your company.
Consider contacting Cloud Services Vermont to discover an IT partner who has the skills and resources to provide complete security for your organisation if your present IT vendor is not up to the task of tackling the tremendous security concerns facing your company.