Although cybersecurity professionals work day and night to eliminate threats from the system, hackers are always looking for new ways to circumvent security measures. When you least expect it, they find a gap in the defense and enter!
Therefore, virtual threats are constantly evolving — and they are evolving faster and faster! Malicious mechanisms are constantly renewed and increase the damage of older and more well-known ones.
And especially in the era of working from home, these threats have become even more dangerous. Additionally, they take advantage of remote environments and access tools to infiltrate cloud systems and services.
Let's list here the main threats on the network:
Malware
The term “malware” is used to describe a group of malicious software. The main examples are:
- Virus – malicious codes (software or program) that infect applications and files, modifying their structure and making copies of themselves to propagate.
- Worms – a more dangerous type of virus, as it acts independently, without the need for a host to propagate.
- Trojan horses (trojan) – malware that deceives users about its real intention, showing itself as harmless to be installed without resistance.
- spyware – software installed on the device or system without the user’s knowledge.
- However, it is important to mention that malware attacks are increasingly sophisticated, operating “without files” — the so-called fileless malware. In other words, a virus that attacks without the user downloading a suspicious program.
- Thus, malware is managing to bypass some more familiar detection methods such as antivirus tools, which scan malicious file attachments.
Ransomware
Ransomware is a type of malware that acts like a hijacker: it invades your computer, locks your data or the system itself, and demands a monetary ransom to unlock it.
It is also possible for ransomware to make files public instead of locking them. Personal photos and videos, sensitive information or confidential data end up on the network and causing harm — material and even emotional — to users.
A common target of ransomware attacks are government institutions. This is because they are generally easier to breach than large companies.
Phishing
Phishing is a type of social engineering, that is, a scam to steal money from the user. The user is tricked by the cybercriminal into providing personally identifiable information (PII).
In phishing scams, emails or text messages have an “official appearance”, as if they were coming from a legitimate company, requesting confidential information from the victim: credit card, address, login details, etc.
internal threats
This may seem like the strangest threat of all, but it must be considered. Because it tends to happen more frequently than we would like.
Additionally, current employees, former employees, business partners, third-party companies or anyone who has had access to the system (or network) can be considered an insider threat — but only if they abuse their access permissions.
Because they are “in-house,” these insider threats can be difficult to detect and even more difficult to combat. Furthermore, especially because traditional security solutions, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems, almost always focus on external threats.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
DDoS is a cyber attack method that attempts to crash the server or network by overloading it with traffic far beyond its operating capacity. In other words, the website receives so many requests in a short space of time that it cannot maintain its functioning and becomes inoperative.
In an analogy with the physical world, it is like a highway at Christmas time. An absurd amount of cars trying to go to the same place. Result: congestion. The highway simply stops, and the cars stay in place.
DDoS attacks overwhelm corporate networks through the simple network management protocol (also known by the acronym SNMP) used for modems, printers, switches, routers and servers.
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Advanced persistent threats (APTs)
APT is a prolonged cyberattack in which an attacker infiltrates a system and remains undetected for a long period of time. Furthermore, the objective of this type of attack is not to cause damage to the network, but rather to steal data and information from the victim.
Thus, the attacker leaves networks and systems intact, remaining hidden only so that he can spy on commercial activity and obtain confidential data, avoiding the use of defensive measures.
However, APT attacks generally require a lot of effort from hackers and require a large amount of resources. In this way, hackers often select high-value targets, such as nation-states and large corporations, with the aim of stealing information over a long period of time.
Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks
Man-in-the-middle is an espionage attack in which the attacker positions himself “in the middle” of two parties, intercepts communication between them, and retransmits the messages pretending to be one of those parties.
A common way to do this is for the hacker to set up Wi-Fi access points to intercept the data. Furthermore, since most of the time these access points are not protected by a password or a more sophisticated defense mechanism, anyone can log in.
It renames the connection according to the location — for example, with the name of a coffee shop — and tricks the user into logging in. Once the victim is online, with all of their data passing through the hacker's access point, they are completely exposed.
Therefore, it is interesting to mention that the concept of MITM attack is not restricted to the virtual world. Sending fake bills and invoices by mail is also an example of this practice, but in the physical world. The criminal sends the bill to the victim, pretending to be a financial institution or company, and receives the money she sent as payment.
Security levels in the face of threats
It is worth highlighting right away that there are different levels of security — which will require different levels of investment. In other words, the higher the level of security, the greater the investment.
Making a parallel with the physical world we would have the following situation: imagine that you have a house in São Paulo and you want to make it safer. For each security implementation there is a cash contribution: electric fence, automatic door, security camera, 24-hour surveillance, etc. All of this reduces the likelihood of you being robbed — although it doesn't eliminate it completely. The same goes for cybersecurity.
When developing a website on WordPress — which is a well-known CMS (security management system, in Portuguese) on the market — or on another platform, the company needs to keep in mind what level of security they want to obtain.
Cloud providers already have tools to combat virtual threats. Therefore, working websites are already technically protected in terms of structures. However, in general, these tools are not sufficient to fill all vulnerability points.
Therefore, it is essential that you have proactive security maintenance:
- Constantly update the CMS
- Include layers of application-scoped security
- Have a CDN (content distribution network, in Portuguese) to distribute your website content in different locations and regions
- Have a firewall, that is, a device that uses a global basis to monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic, blocking specific traffic according to a defined set of security rules.
The single, global database allows this level of protection to ensure that IPs identified as “threats” — due to intrusion attempts at other addresses — are blocked and do not have access to your website.
Therefore, the learning curve is quick. These tools collect information about existing viruses and attacks that already occur, creating mechanisms, through machine learning, to block new threats.
Disaster Recovery (DR)
Disaster Recovery (RD) or, as it is more commonly known, Disaster Recovery (DR) is a protection mechanism that allows the holder to recover the site in the event of a disaster — that is, a physical accident (such as a fire or flood in the building where the company is hosted), a cyber attack, sabotage, vandalism, technology failures, etc.
Thus, disaster recovery is the process of maintaining or reestablishing essential infrastructure and systems after a natural or man-made disaster. This process employs security policies, tools and various procedures.
Disaster recovery focuses on information technology (IT), or the technology systems that support critical business functions. This procedure assumes that the primary site cannot be recovered immediately and restores data and services to a secondary site.
Therefore, it is necessary to develop an action plan to recover your website in case of failures. And how can we build this action plan? Click here to find out
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