Over the past few years, there have been a number of cyberattacks on industries ranging from education to finance and even retail. Attacks occur so frequently that nearly 41% of all businesses have succumbed to or experienced a cyberattack of some kind in the past few years. That’s pretty significant—and incredibly alarming! Technology runs our world and helps us live our lives to their fullest. Everything from our morning routine to getting car insurance quotes and financing a new home or vehicle largely depends on technology to fully function. In a world that’s so connected, the opportunity to cause harm, wreak havoc, or extort industries for financial gain is occasionally too great an opportunity to pass up for some attackers. So, they engage in phishing attempts, scams, and ransomware to accomplish their insidious goals. The scourge of ransomware is prevalent in our modern, tech-based society. Although ransomware is terrible, it’s far from the only extant threat. Here are five cybersecurity threats to be aware of in 2022.
Phishing
Everyone’s heard about the dreaded concept of phishing. Phishing is where someone tries to obtain an individual’s personal information through email or sends them to a compromised website. Looking at what’s the most effective at stopping phishing attempts in their tracks, the most common-sense approach is simply to carefully verify your emails, watch out for suspicious links or email addresses, and raise as much awareness as possible of potential phishing attacks that might threaten your organization. Phishing can compromise your data, steal personal info, and even act as a conduit for ransomware to infiltrate your computer or network. Organizations and individual users can also use multi-factor authentication to circumvent any potential phishing attempts. Multi-factor authentication—where users use two different verification processes, such as an email and text message before gaining access to their account—is a powerful way to remain safe while interacting, browsing, checking emails, or working online. Along with utilizing other phishing best practices and precautions, you can keep yourself and your organization safe from the dangers of successful phishing attempts.
The Log4j Vulnerability
The Log4j vulnerability might sound a bit new to most of us. But it is an existing threat and a source of some concern. The log4J library is used by a lot of companies to log and configure applications. The vulnerability is a remote code execution that allows attackers to get into those systems and run whatever code they like. The threat is only growing and causing many problems throughout several industries.
Supply Chain Attacks
If there’s one thing most of us haven’t stopped hearing about in the last year or so, it’s concerns over the supply chain. If bottlenecks, raw material shortages, and logistical issues weren’t enough of a problem, there’s also threats to the supply chain through cyber attacks. Supply chain attackers can take advantage of some of the monitoring issues the chain is having to implement their attacks. This leads to possible data breaches, malware/ransomware infiltrations, and ransomware – especially if attackers managed to infiltrate a supplier’s cloud services. The prevalence of these attacks will only continue throughout the year, as they offer a ripe target for hackers to carry out attacks across the various sectors of the supply chain.
Ransomware
One of the biggest, most common threats facing pretty much every industry today is ransomware. Ransomware can be a nightmare for anybody affected. It leads to data loss, disrupted operations, changes in the way payments can be made by customers, and much, much worse. So, what is ransomware and how does it occur? Ransomware is any type of malware that sneaks onto your network or devices, encrypting your files along the way. It uses either symmetric or asymmetric encryption methods to encrypt the files, while a decryption key is generated by the attacker and held for a ransom. The idea is that when the company pays the ransom, the attacker releases the description key so they can access their files. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen and can often result in lost files. Backups, cybersecurity best practices, keeping things up to date, and using strong password / multi-factor authentication can help deter the ransomware threat, but it still lingers as a significant concern in 2022.
Cloud Security Breaches
Just as technology makes the world go round, the cloud makes everything run more smoothly. If you love listening to music every day during your commute, storing your files easily without taking up precious hard drive space or using myriad other features across a wide breadth of different applications, then you’re undoubtedly quite familiar with the cloud. Sadly, cloud security breaches can happen. Chief among the concerns over cloud security in 2021 was the possibility and fear of a data breach (or significant loss of data). Data privacy is a key issue in cloud security. Cloud migration is ideal for running a business, but it comes preloaded with the caveat that as companies migrate workloads to the cloud, the risk of a breach increases. So, implementing cloud security/cybersecurity best practices along with a software protection suite might be a viable option for protecting your company’s cloud as we move into the future.
