What Are The Most Prominent Cyber Risks In 2023? How To Mitigate Them

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March 2, 2023 Business

In this digital age, almost everything you need to run a business is online thanks to various online tools. Unfortunately, that means most of the important parts of your enterprise are within reach of cybercriminals.

These malicious elements work to sabotage your systems, steal data and other resources, and keep your operations on the backpedal. Any combination of these, organized or not, can lead to serious losses in reputation and investment.

If you want to maintain an edge in 2023, cybersecurity should be one of your main priorities. As threats and attacks become more sophisticated, being up to date with emerging threats will protect your organization from the undesirable effects of a data breach.

Fortunately, it’s not as complex as it sounds. Turnkey solutions, like intelligence platforms, provide the tools you need to maintain security infrastructure and protect your operations. Click here to learn more about them.

But before you work on protecting yourself from threats, you must first know them. Here are the most prominent cyber risks in 2023 and what you can do to mitigate them.

1. Social Engineering Attacks

These attacks involve playing on social conventions to lower people’s caution and get them to reveal vital information. They can come as emails or forms that look like they belong in regular business communications, except for certain elements like errors in sender emails and formatting details. These are so small that most users take them for granted, providing criminals access to the company’s networks or resources.

Common examples of social engineering attacks include phishing, shareware, spear phishing, and baiting.

What makes them so insidious is how they use deception and human error. Even having highly sophisticated security systems cannot fully prevent breaches at this scale when employees are unaware.

There lies the key to fighting them. If you provide people in your organization with tools to identify and screen out social engineering attacks, you reduce the risk of threats greatly.

Some of the best practices to lower the risk of social engineering attacks include two-factor or multi-factor authentication, the use of solid passwords, regular password updating, and remote access limiting.

Additionally, providing training and education to your workforce is crucial to dealing with them. Keeping the people who encounter them regularly informed should stop these threats at the moment of contact.

2. Ransomware

Ransomware is a persistent threat to businesses to this day. It refers to malware specifically designed to infiltrate an organization’s network and encrypt all the data and systems without permission or acknowledgment. This locks out organizations from their own assets, drawing their operations to a halt until a settlement is made, usually in the form of a ransom (hence the name).

Until this settlement is fulfilled, the affected business suffers from an extended downtime and an inability to meet the needs of its clientele. In turn, this results in major losses.

Despite its prevalence, years of experience have shown experts that common-sense measures do a lot in preventing ransomware from becoming a major threat. These include backing up your data and updating all systems and software.

The former is particularly straightforward; by having copies of essential assets in a separate location, you never risk losing the progress of your operations. You can use external drives for backups, although cloud storage offers more in terms of safety and storage capacity.

Meanwhile, the latter works on the idea that some cybercriminals count on companies to cling to outdated infrastructure. Keeping your systems updated should make it easier to deal with ransomware before it causes significant damage.

Additionally, a combination of antivirus, antimalware, and firewalls will reduce your risk of a ransomware attack.

3. Sabotaging Internet Of Things (IoT) Systems

In recent years, a steady rise in the number of attacks on Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been observed. Since these rely on an Internet connection to work, they’re vulnerable to hackers who want to use them to mine data or sabotage your operations.

Depending on your business, you might rely on several IoT devices to keep your daily activities streamlined. Although the automation aspect does give your enterprise a much-needed boost, it has its share of risks.

The foremost one is how it gives potential hackers many openings to infiltrate your business. To lower the risk of that happening to you, here are some steps you should take:

Routinely update all devices and software. IoT systems usually come with their own safety and security features, which only work at their best when they meet current threats. Always keep an eye out for debugs and patches.
Use solid passwords, ideally a combination of upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols.
Switch the default passwords on IoT devices and router names to new ones. This is a step some first-time users miss.

If you count on IoT systems to run your business, you should make sure they have the necessary specs for protection. Invest in their security to maintain the level of productivity and efficiency you enjoy.

4. Password Theft

All this talk of passwords warrants it getting its own point of discussion.

In most hacking attempts, the password is usually the first element being tested out. Many hackers actually attempt to infiltrate a network by guessing this. The methods include brute-force password guessing, which involves testing every conceivable character combination, and dictionary attacks, which use common words or phrases.

These may seem to be clunky ways to steal information. But the probability of them getting a password right is never zero.

Of course, there are criminals who simply use other attacks, like social engineering, to steal passwords.

Multi-factor authentication usually solves this problem by providing an extra layer of data entry that is otherwise unavailable to unauthorized people. Creating solid passwords is also important. Make sure these don’t involve personal details or stay the same for long periods.

Stay Afloat Amid Threats

Regardless of the size and scope of your business, prioritizing security is the key to maintaining an edge in a realm of ever-evolving threats. Knowing about these risks is just the start; develop your security strategy with a team of experts to stay safe, secure, and successful.