As more and more businesses go online, they have to contend with cyber-attacks. It is, therefore important that all business owners know what threats exist, how to detect them, and what to do in case their cyber and online infrastructure is attacked. Below, we will look at which cyber threats you should be keeping an eye on and how to protect your business.

Data Leakage

As businesses use more cloud-based services, they open themselves up to the possibility of data leaks. Security breaches have become quite common, with some of the biggest companies seeing petabytes of sensitive information leaked online. These threats are becoming harder to detect as they become increasingly sophisticated.

To protect your business from data breaches that lead to data leaks, it is important that you have a cybersecurity expert set up and routinely check your cyber infrastructure.

Phishing

Phishing is quite common and you might have encountered it if you have ever received an email directing you to provide sensitive data for some purpose such as verifying your account. Because people are now much more aware of email phishing, cybercriminals have turned to social media phishing. Here, they pretend to be you or your business. Once they do this, people who trust your business end up providing them with sensitive information.

Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook have been identified as some of the worst platforms for social media phishing, which is why it is important to focus on these three. Start by letting your social media team know all your handles so they can weed out fraudulent ones. Next, you should teach them how to report phishing scams so that they do not happen to other businesses.

Ransomware

Ransomware is a type of malware that accesses a computer system, encrypts the data it holds and asks for a ransom. If the ransom is paid, all the data is lost because only the person targeting your business has the encryption key. These types of attacks are becoming increasingly common and the sad fact is that over half of all businesses are not prepared to prevent or deal with these types of attacks.

Ensuring your cyber infrastructure is robust enough to prevent any intrusions remains the best way to protect your business from ransomware attacks. It is also important to do regular, full backups to a secure server that is not connected to your main server. That way, once you are attacked, you can restore all your data without paying the ransom.

Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are not as common as they used to be, but they remain a potent threat to your business. A DDoS attack happens when your server or website receives so many requests that it is not able to serve all of them. When this happens, your website or server might become unresponsive and unusable. This attack is usually carried out using IoT devices and infected computers that are directed to send your server or website thousands, and in rare cases millions, of requests per second.

To protect yourself from this type of attack, it is important to have distributed servers so that you can distribute the load to different servers when a DDoS attack happens. This way, no one server gets overwhelmed, and even if your website or server will be slower than usual, it will not be crippled.

Every business must stay vigilant to detect cyber threats and act in time. If not, the damage done by these attacks might be irreparable.