In today’s digital age, businesses are constantly under attack from cybercriminals, and these attacks can have a devastating impact on businesses, resulting in financial losses, reputational damage, and even disruption of operations. In fact, according to research the average cost of an organization detecting and escalating a data breach is $1.58 million.
Businesses today leverage third-party SaaS tools, build solutions on public cloud platforms, and exchange enterprise data with public LLM agents like Chat GPT for various operational requirements. It involves a series of procedures and techniques to protect a business’s essential systems and data from vulnerability and against cyberattacks. Customers on the other hand, trust their data with various business applications and environments for their everyday operations related to banking, shopping, communicating, healthcare consulting, and almost every aspect of their day-to-day life. Resilient cybersecurity is the bridge of trust between businesses, their solutions, and their customers.
Why Your Enterprise Should Have a Cybersecurity Strategy
First, many companies presume they will not be affected by potential cyber threats due to their size, industry or location. Cybercriminals don’t discriminate their target by enterprise size. A cyberattack that hit Target corp., a major retail chain, was carried out via the network of an HVAC contractor that worked with the chain. Sometimes cyberhackers are interested only in using a company’s systems and conscripting them into an army of bots to perpetrate massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. Ransomware attacks are costly and disruptive with an average downtime of 21 days leaving businesses to suffer huge financial and reputational damage.
As businesses move their applications to the cloud they start to use a shared infrastructure. While cloud platforms offer a lot of security measures on their part to secure the entire environment from external attacks, security often follows a shared responsibility model on the cloud. Your business should set up its own access management system, firewalls, and maintain up-to-date security protocols for their data warehouses or legacy applications that may reside outside the cloud environment in a hybrid setup while frequently interacting with the cloud-native applications. Just migrating to the cloud doesn’t imply you are done and dusted with keeping a check on enterprise cybersecurity.
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As technology continues to evolve so do cyber-attack strategies. With the penetration of technologies like Generative AI and Intelligent Automation attacks today are quicker and complex. Cybersecurity is an active company priority and requires continuous upgrade.
As the global workforce increasingly adopts to a work from home format using their personal systems over a public network attack surface and the vulnerable points are increased. On top of that, maximum number of cyber-attacks happen through phishing that targets high position holding individuals in an enterprise which leaves a room for continuous training and awareness exercise among employees.
What are the most common cyber security risks to businesses?
Cyberattack strategies evolves at a rapid pace at the core lies the following modus operandi:
Malware attack
A malicious software is spread through email attachments, malicious links, or infected websites. They are capable of breaching firewalls and stealing data or tracking a device’s user activity. Malware is the most common type of cyberattack encompassing subsets like ransomware, trojans, spyware, viruses, worms, keyloggers, bots, cryptojacking etc. A malware is used as a ransomware to disable computer systems and put applications and network under siege demanding hefty ransom to restore things. Each day, around 200,000 ransomware strains are recorded.
Phishing attack
Phishing is a type of cyberattack that uses email, SMS, phone, social media, to exploit human vulnerabilities to extract sensitive information — such as passwords or account numbers. For this they will share impeccable interface copies of a login page like bank login, CRM, c-Panel etc. but with an url owned by the attacker. Once the victim enters the information the attacker has access to the confidential login credentials. Sometimes social engineering techniques is used to convince users to download a malicious file in the disguise of a useful app or some irresistible offer that will install malware on user’s computer or phone. According to a report by email security company Valimail, 3.4 billion phishing emails are sent out daily.
DoS (Denial of Service) attack
A Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack is a malicious, targeted attack that floods a network with false requests in order to jam the access to a service leading to denial of service. Users can’t access mails, websites, online accounts or other resources leading to great customer dissatisfaction. Attackers demand ransom to restore things to normal. Sometimes DoS attacks are made through multiple devices simultaneously to flood a target system known as DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.
Supply Chain Attack
This type of attack initiates at third-party vendors who offer software services. Malicious code is injected into an application impacting all users. Software supply chains are particularly contaminated with such attacks as modern software development involves integrating many off-the-shelf components, such as third-party APIs, open source code, SaaS tools, and proprietary code from software vendors.
Making Cybersecurity an Integral Part of Organizational Culture
As it is evident that, cybersecurity is important for streamlined operations of your enterprise, setting up a strategic initiative to integrate cybersecurity practices into daily operations is necessary. Following are some steps that helps in that direction:
Regularly assess cybersecurity risk and vulnerabilities
Conducting regular cybersecurity assessment helps you identify potential cyber threats and identify gaps in your internal and external cyber security processes. Cybersecurity risk assessment must be done at least once a year to keep your cybersecurity strategy at par with the industry regulations, evolved attack strategies, and maintaining a proactive security stance. An experienced security assessment team evaluates how and where the data of your employees, clients, customers and investors is stored, backed up and protected, as well as who has access to it.
Implement processes to filter third-party risk factors
While internal security is a major area of your cybersecurity strategy don’t leave the third party APIs, or shared cloud environments out of vigil. Establish processes with security measures for exchange of your client data and your employee’s sensitive information. Research well before partnering with an external company and ensure they take good care of your data by updating their cybersecurity strategies aligned with the latest trends.
Apply strong passwords and access control mechanisms
Weak passwords are the weakest link in the cybersecurity shield. An estimated 8 million passwords are stolen every day. Employees should be encouraged to create and use complex and unique passwords. Passwords should be unique and contain at least 12 characters and a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Another good practice is to quarterly update the passwords. Also educate employees not to share password or answers to password related security questions to anyone.
Another blind spot originates from the lack of a centralized monitoring system on data exchange. A centralized data monitoring system helps to keep track of user access of data and spot any mischievous activity. Access control mechanisms can be set to control access to sensitive information on a roles and permissions model basis. An easy and relatively inexpensive way for businesses to defend against potential threats is to reduce their attack surface, in particular reducing data that is redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT). This should include a comprehensive review and inventory of data repositories.
Leverage latest cybersecurity software and techniques
As cybersecurity continues to be a rapidly transforming landscape it is important to maintain the cybersecurity software your enterprise uses in their latest version. Selecting cybersecurity software should be carefully assessed based on industrywide recognition. The latest techniques should be implemented to maintain strict security posture that includes but not limited to data encryption while exchanging data, firewalls at the edge of two interacting environments, intrusion detection systems, and data back up.
Educate employees about potential risks and train about latest security practices
Cybersecurity training will bring awareness among your employees of the latest cybersecurity practices. Educating your employees on the security risks associated with their activities, their functions and duties to maintain security, and roles to mitigate cyberattacks will contribute to overall cybersecurity awareness across your organization. The 2022 Global Risks Report produced by the World Economic Forum revealed that 95% of cyber security threats were partially accounted for by human error. Therefore, it is important to educate your employees on various cybersecurity facts like what a phishing email looks like, what makes a good password, what constitutes exemplary cyber etiquette and train them time to time on the latest cybersecurity trends to make cybersecurity a part of your company culture.
