The top five most dangerous cyber security threats

What are cyber security threats?

Cyber security threats are vulnerabilities that live in your network, infrastructure, cloud, or applications that pose a risk to your organization’s assets. As threats are becoming more serious, every organization must clearly understand the severity of its vulnerabilities – and act on them with appropriate methodologies. 

The types of attacks are legion, but to start, here are the top five most common yet dangerous: 

1. Malware. The most common type of cyber attack. 

   1. Malware is malicious software that includes spyware, ransomware, viruses, and worms. When the user clicks on a malicious link or email, these are installed into the system. Malware can then hinder access to the network, intercept critical information, and more.

2. Social engineering. This is where human psychology is manipulated for an attacker’s goal. 

   1. Examples of social engineering are phishing emails, scareware, quid pro quo, and more.
   2. A third of breaches in 2020 included social engineering, with 90% of the techniques being phishing. 

3. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Bumper-to-bumper traffic in your network.

   1. DDoS Attacks overwhelm systems and networks with traffic which disables them from performing correctly. Hackers use devices compromised by malware or hacking to create a botnet that can scale to the network it is attacking. The botnet infects every machine to perform criminal activity without the awareness of the owner. Artificial intelligence (AI) is also used to perform DDoS attacks. 

4. Third party software. Continually updating and reviewing can pay off. 

   1. Allowing illegitimate third-party software into your system could cause many vulnerabilities. 
   2. For example, Top e-commerce retailers in the US are connected to at least 1,100 third-party resources each with at least one critical vulnerability in 23% of those assets. If one of these vulnerabilities is taken advantage of, the gateway of this system of applications is wide open for them to compromise as well.

5. Vulnerabilities within cloud computing. With the transfer of services through the internet, systems are prone to vulnerabilities.

   1. Cloud use across industries increased by 50% due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Attention to proper cloud storage configuration, security of application user interfaces (APIs), and end-user actions on cloud devices could save your network. Preventative measures such as these strengthen your cloud computing defenses. 
   2. Vulcan Cyber offers powerful security for cloud environments. Learn more here.

How to prevent these attacks? A comprehensive risk remediation strategy lets you intervene before these breaches can happen. Vulcan Cyber can help not only prioritize risk in your environment but also enrich, orchestrate and remediate risk as needed.