The Impact of Cyberattacks

Not taking the right steps to protect your organization and bolster your cybersecurity can have negative impacts. A significant cyberattack or data breach can lead to indirect costs, direct expenses, and opportunity costs for your business.

Indirect cost is the effort and time that internal resources spend after and during a data breach, for instance, in-house communications and investigations.

Direct expenses are the costs incurred to complete specific activities, like providing victims a free credit monitoring subscription, offering customers a discount for future products/services, setting up a hotline, and conducting forensic investigations.

On the other hand, opportunity costs are the expenses of lost business opportunities because of a bad brand reputation. The cost of a lost business opportunity can be tremendous if the data breach is revealed publicly through the media.

Why Cybersecurity is Crucial

Cybercrimes put your IT equipment, data, and money at risk. If hackers get access to them and to your network, they will be able to inflict damage with whatever they see and find, like:

• Product designs
• Manufacturing processes
• Plans for business growth
• Pricing structure
• Banking details of your company
• Credit card details of customers
• Other intellectual properties

As many people now work remotely, cybersecurity has become important. Many businesses work with the best cybersecurity providers and use cloud-based tools as well as technology for their everyday options, such as communicating with suppliers/customers, banking transactions, selling & buying, advertising, and online meetings.

For reputational and financial reasons, it would be best to protect your cloud-based system and data against hacks or unauthorized breaches.

Crucial Cybersecurity Steps

Cyber attackers target businesses of various sizes and industries. This is why it is important to follow the following steps to navigate through the cybercrime realm:

Train Employees

Workers are usually the weakest links in security systems. One careless mistake, like providing confidential details to untrusted sources, may put the cybersecurity of an entire company at risk. This is why training workers on best practices and cybersecurity awareness is crucial.

As a business owner, you must create comprehensive security procedures and policies that every employee should follow. You need to also provide your workers with proper training on emerging and new threats.

Upgrade Software

Perhaps your PC is running on last year’s Windows version, or a laptop sitting next to it has an outdated Mac OS X, and you are still boasting a CRT monitor. You must confront this situation when looking around your office and you will see how things unfold.

One important step to always have in your arsenal is to update your software to the newest version to add extra security patches. As you work on that, assign one of your employees to set up a solid tracking spreadsheet to list the software and hardware in all workstations and the version they are working on currently.

Stop Using Unsecure Networks

Using a public Wi-Fi network can put your company at great risk because it isn’t secure. Advise workers against that, too, especially if they work remotely.

Several ways can help you prevent important information from being passed or transmitted. One way is to only use an encrypted site and always avoid mobile applications requiring sensitive details. You can easily tell whether a site has been encrypted – it starts with https.

Another way is to use a VPN (virtual private network) that encrypts traffic between the internet and your computer. If resources aren’t a problem, create a virtual private network for workers to use so they can have remote and secure access.

Use 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication)

As part of a business strategy, you have to think of how you can protect your customers’ accounts and your systems. Using two-factor authentication is one way to do that. It simply means that anyone logging into your system must provide something else in addition to their password and username so they can verify they are exactly who they claim to be.

You may use it on an internal system and your customer-facing system. To do that, just enable 2FA on those systems, including the following:

• Accounting services
• Document storage
• Email services
• Social media accounts
• Banking systems
• Any system you use to keep financial, personal, or customer data

Ignore Suspicious Texts and Emails

At times, the easier security steps are simply the best. Adopt the habit of never replying to or opening suspicious emails, even if it seems that you know the sender.

If you still choose to open them, avoid clicking on suspicious links and downloading attachments. Doing that can make you one of the victims of online identity and financial theft through phishing scams.

A phishing email is among the most nefarious ways technological advancements affect people’s lives this year. It often comes from a known sender, like someone you did business with or a bank. Through it, hackers try to acquire financial and private data, such as credit card numbers and bank account details.

In 2024, every hacker is willing to go through various digital avenues so they can find victims. So, you must treat texts and emails from unknown senders with caution.

Safely Dispose of Old Media and Computers

Before thrashing or donating old computers, make sure you wipe every piece of invaluable information in the hard drive or disk. While at it, delete sensitive personal or business data on flash drives, old CDs, or other media.

Afterward, destroy those items or consider taking them to companies that can shred them on your behalf. If you have sensitive paper information, destroy it using an incinerator or a crosscut shredder.

The Takeaway

You can’t be assured of 100% security and safety. Cybercrimes are always looming and infiltrate even secure systems. Hence, putting in place flexible cybersecurity measures and proactively using breach detection mechanisms can be sustainable and effective in securing information and infrastructures. Learn more about the most powerful cybersecurity software tools for this year.

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These obstacles usually come in the form of cyber security threats that can wreak true havoc upon the companies that are just starting out and still don’t have sufficient infrastructure to fend off countless attacks coming from cyberspace.

It’s always a good idea to hire a professional best rated agency that will take care of your company website design and development. This is very beneficial when it comes to your website security because you will able to get professional help in securing the company website from attacks such as DDOs attacks and so on.

The unique situation in the sense of cyber security threats makes startup security one of the highest priorities of the modern IT sector. Let us take a look then at some of the most common startup security threats your development team should take into consideration when designing the products aimed at this market sector.

1. Phishing

Phishing is a scam strategy where some malicious party tries to trick some of the employees into giving up the info required for accessing the company’s resources.

They are usually sent via email and either request that workers send their sensitive info in the written form for some mock verification process or redirect them to a simulated log-in page they access upon entering their username and password. As simple as these attacks might be, it takes only one distracted worker to make this scheme work.

That is why the developers should put a higher priority on formal communication channels and verification procedures. Phishing can have many different negative effects on businesses.

For example, this can be a way of damaging the business’s reputation, a business can lose money or intellectual property as well. It is also possible for hackers to disrupt operational activities within the company by using this method.

2. Cryptojacking

Essentially, cryptojacking represents a type of malware attack in which the hackers infect the system with embedded scripts commanding the victim’s IT resources to mine cryptocurrency on behalf of the attacker.

As far-fetched as this may seem, cryptojacking is a very serious threat causing more than 15 million security incidents on a monthly basis.

And even though in this case the attackers never try to access the company’s data, the taxing process of mining can make even the most mundane tasks like using Slack slow and tiresome.

And wasting time on simple tasks always causes unforeseen costs and common productivity drops. This is why attacks such as cryptojacking can be even more dangerous for companies than direct money loss since it makes damages that slowly make businesses lose money.

3. Data breach website attacks

Data breaches are some of the simplest and at the same time, the most common and the most dangerous attack the startups can experience.

As their name suggests, they are nothing more than simple brute force attacks on the website and accessing the information that shouldn’t be accessible to the visitors so the best way to deal with them is simply ramping up the website defenses.

This can be accomplished in numerous ways but any company should make getting an SSL certificate one of its top priorities. As for the very technologies, this form of protection is usually achieved through high-level encryption.

4. Ransomware

In its essence, ransomware attacks are very similar to the cryptojacking. In this case, the hackers use the same channels to access some companies’ digital resources. In this case, though, instead of mustering these assets for mining cryptocurrencies, the attackers will simply hold them tied until the companies agree to pay them the extorted ransom.

According to recent surveys, the percentage of global organizations who reported some form of ransomware attacks sits at around 37% which represents a 62% year-on-year increase. The solution to this problem can be found in multiple backups, secure cloud-based servers, and high-level encryption.

5. Focused DDoS attacks

If you are unfamiliar with the term, DDoS stands for distributed denial of service and it represents a form of attack where hackers will overwhelm your servers to the point of crashing and shutting down. This usually happens by funneling requests through multiple connected PCs or IoT devices.

When the servers are overwhelmed into submission the hackers will usually request some sort of ransom to fix this ‘traffic jam’ and allow the attacked party to go back to its daily going. The solution to this common issue is usually found in an added level of protocol verification and more optimized request channel distribution.

6. Employee training

Last but not least, we would like to remind you that, despite countless channels for attacks, the greatest liability in terms of cyber security still comes in the form of people using the system.

No matter how well-designed the defenses might be, the lack of training or knowledge about the cyber security threats will ultimately compromise its overall consistency. That is why the development teams should work very closely with the clients’ companies on keeping the employees up to date with all the security projects that are being implanted as well as provide them basic training about how to keep common attacks at bay and recognize simple threats like poaching.

We hope these few mentions gave you a general idea about where your teams should put their focus when building up the startup’s security systems.

Keeping in mind that the number of organizations entering the business arena grows at an exponential rate it is only expected that the number of attacks aimed at these inexperienced organizations will grow as well.

Finding a solution for all these treats will require a lot of time, patience, and effort but now you know where to start. This simple advantage can considerably relieve your workload.

This is why it’s crucial to take safety measures and adopt protocols in order to protect both websites and users from the possibility of damage and loss.

The post A Developer’s Guide to Startup Security ─ 6 Common Threats appeared first on Techie Buzz.