What are Cyber Security Threats?
Cybersecurity threats are acts performed by individuals with harmful intent, whose goal is to steal data, cause damage to or disrupt computing systems. Common categories of cyber threats include malware, social engineering, man in the middle (MitM) attacks, denial of service (DoS), and injection attacks—we describe each of these categories in more detail below.
Cyber threats can originate from a variety of sources, from hostile nation states and terrorist groups, to individual hackers, to trusted individuals like employees or contractors, who abuse their privileges to perform malicious acts.
What is the difference between a threat and a vulnerability?
If threats are attackers throwing rocks at a wall, a vulnerability is a weak spot in the wall — a place where attackers can break a window or pull out a loose rock and let themselves in.
Put simply, vulnerabilities are flaws in your systems that can be exploited by attackers. These are often not malicious errors, but simply mistakes or things that have been overlooked. An Amazon Web Services (AWS) bucket might be inadvertently left open to the public Internet, or perhaps a password wasn’t changed or a patch wasn’t installed on time.
Such mistakes are on the rise, according to Accurics, which finds that misconfigured cloud storage services are commonplace in 93% of cloud deployments. It’s not just cloud storage and software, however – vulnerabilities can be people as well. If you haven’t trained your employees about avoiding clicking on suspicious links, for example, they can be vulnerable to phishing.
What are common network threats?
Network threats come in a variety of forms and are constantly evolving and changing. The most common threats are likely familiar to you already.
1. Phishing attacks
Phishing attacks are attempts to trick people into opening suspicious links or downloading malicious programs. They range from the easily-spotted to sophisticated cons targeting a specific individual. Phishing campaigns are currently one of the most popular methods of attack, according to Microsoft.
2. Ransomware attacks
Often delivered via successful phishing campaigns, ransomware enters your systems, encrypts your data, and holds it hostage until you pay the attackers’ ransom. Once the ransom is paid, the attackers will allegedly give you control of your data, but criminals don’t always keep their word.
3. Malware
Any malicious program that enters your system, malware can be ransomware, a virus, or a worm that infects first a device, then the whole network.
4. DDoS attacks
DDoS attacks overwhelm your servers with requests for information, forcing sites, servers, and applications to shut down.
5. Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs)
During an APT attack, an unauthorized attacker codes into a system network, stays there quietly, and collects information.
6. SQL Injection
SQL injection attacks inject malicious code into a site or application using SQL queries in order to exploit security vulnerabilities and obtain or destroy private data.
How can you identify threats and vulnerabilities?
When you have an idea of which cybersecurity threats exist, it becomes easier to identify them and take steps to protect your organization.
1. Watch your own network
The most important way to identify threats and vulnerabilities is to make sure you can see them. You want to be able to look at your defenses the way an attacker would, understanding the weaknesses in your network and the threats most likely to affect your organization.
2. Use threat intelligence
What sort of attacks are being launched, and which threats might your organization attract? By understanding the threat landscape, you can protect your organization against threats before they happen.
3. Penetration testing
Where do your defenses buckle under pressure? Which employee is likely to click a bad link in a suspicious email? You can’t know until you test your defenses, and penetration testing is the best way to do that.
4. Manage permissions
By segmenting your network and managing permissions so that not every employee can access every part of your network, you can control who sees what — and also protect your network against data breaches and malicious insiders.
5. Use a firewall
There’s no reason not to use firewalls, internally and externally. Firewalls keep unauthorized users from getting access to your network. They also keep tabs on the traffic throughout your network.
6. Continuously monitor your network
Security needs to be constantly monitored to be effective. Once you’ve set your controls, make sure they’re checked regularly and updated often so that they can catch any new vulnerabilities or threats that may target your network.
H2: How to prepare for network security threats
To best mitigate network security threats, you must first know how to prepare for them. Here are a few tips to help secure your network.
1. Segregate Your Network
Segmentation involves splitting a network into various zones. This limits the potential impact of an attack to one zone, and it requires extra work on behalf of the attackers to gain access to other network zones. Within this time, a threat can be mitigated before it affects the larger network.
2. Use a Proxy Server
A proxy server is an intermediary server that separates end users from the websites they browse. Utilizing a proxy server gives you greater control and monitoring over user behavior and which sites they can access. In addition, it can make sure that outbound connections are actually performed by a human and not a botnet.
3. Use Network Address Translation
Network Address Translation (NAT) is when one or more local IP addresses are translated into one or more Global IP addresses and vice versa. NAT can essentially hide the internal network from the outside world. This can help avert attacks that target specific IP addresses or prevent devices on the internal network from being accessed directly from the internet. Network Address Translation can also help prevent users from accessing malicious or unwanted websites.
How SecurityScorecard can help identify threats
The threat landscape is always shifting, as attackers try new ways to enter your network. To help monitor your systems, consider a solution that monitors your networks continuously, giving you an outside-in view of your company’s security.
Our easy-to-read security ratings, based on an A-F scale, enable you to provide your leadership with the necessary documentation to prove governance over your vendor risk management program.