Cyber risks can pose threats to your business that could result in an unauthorized access to company systems and data. This could result in data breach, ransom demands, destruction of property, disruptions to services and financial losses.
Cyberattacks can be classified as malware, phishing, or social engineering. Malware attacks grow rapidly as attackers come up with ways to circumvent or get around security systems. These changes require a constant cat and mouse game between cybersecurity teams and attackers. When cybersecurity analysts detect an attack from cyberspace, it’s usually too for them to stop it from affecting the business.
Other types of cyberattacks comprise advanced persistent threats (APTs) which are slow, sly and aimed at specific targets to steal sensitive information. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks flood systems with internet traffic, causing disruption to operations and serve as a cover for more extensive attacks. Ransomware attacks lock data and demand a payment to decrypt it. And supply chain attacks compromise software or hardware before it gets to the user, exploiting trust in third-party.
In addition to cyberattacks, be aware of the risks posed by people within your organization who have legitimate access to systems and information. This includes unhappy employees and malicious contractors. They may have a grudge or an incentive to hurt the company, and are often difficult to detect. Another threat is misconfigurations or vulnerabilities in your IT environment that attackers could exploit. This could include not updating computer programs and failing to implement segmentation of networks to separate different types of data.