Although your competitors should be a main focus, along with establishing methods of pursuing customers to purchase from you. In reality, your biggest threat, to your business, will always be malware. Once a malicious file is able to infiltrate your network, it can very easily reign havoc, causing loss of revenue, data and reputation, depending on its severity.
1. Fileless Malware
This is unlike your traditional malware, which uses .exe files to infect your system, fileless malware on the other hand, doesn’t affect files or the file system. Instead, these kinds of malicious attacks utilise non-file objects, like PowerShell, Microsoft Office macros, WMI and other similar tools. One of the most notable fileless malware attacks is Operation Cobalt Kitty, which involved the Ocean Lotus Group successfully infiltrating a number of cooperation’s, conducting several stealthy operations over the course of 6 months, before being caught.
Because these kinds of attacks have no executable file, it makes it incredibly difficult for your antivirus software to protect you from it. To protect yourself against such an attack, you want to ensure your users have the correct privileges and rights, to do whatever task they’ve been earmarked to do. As this will prevent your cybercriminals from being able to use fileless malware to steal employee information and use that to access previously restricted data. Additionally, you should also disable system level tools like PowerShell to any user that doesn’t really need it.
2. Worms
They are similar to viruses in that they make copies of themselves, but unlike with your viruses, a worm doesn’t need the program that it has infected to be opened or run in order to activate. Worms work by exploiting the vulnerabilities of programs, or they may use methods that are designed to trick people into copying the worm to their network systems, such as, enticing an employee to download a file contained in an email.
They are able to run independently on any hosts system, allowing them to spread very easily and very quickly across a network. Once they are in place, they are able to carry out harmful activities such as stealing sensitive information as well as deleting confidential files. Worms have proven to be so effective that many governments use them in their cyberespionage operations.
As worms replicate on a system, this leads to them taking up more and more space on a hard drive, which in turn adversely effects that systems performance. If you notice your system running a little slower, or your free space mysteriously disappearing, or files being erased, these are all positive signs that your system is infected with a worm.
3. Bots
A bot is a little program that is designed to carry out an automated task, without any interaction from anyone. Once a bot infiltrates a system, it is able to spread itself across many systems, eventually establishing a botnet. This network made up of bot-infected systems, can then be controlled by the cybercriminal to carry out additional large scale attacks, oftentimes with the system owners having no idea that such attacks are being waged from their system. Bots can carry out very large attacks, such as the DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service Attacks in 2018 that brought down the entire internet in Eastern USA,
The most effective way to control these bots is to use tools that are capable of establishing whether or not traffic is coming from a user or from a bot. As an example, you could add a CAPTCHA to your forms, in order to prevent bots from being able to overwhelm your site. In this, you will be able to separate good traffic from bad bot traffic.
4. Viruses
A virus is a term used to describe all forms of malware by both the average end user and the media. However, the truth is, most malware programs are not viruses. A computer virus works by modifying the host’s files, in such a way that the virus file is executed the moment the program itself is run.
In today’s world of malicious attacks, computer viruses, at least in the purest form, are no longer as common. As they comprise no more than 10% of all attack types. This is good news, as viruses are the only malware type that infects other files. This in turn makes them quite difficult to clean up, as the malware must be cleaned from legitimate files and programs. This has always been a painstaking and difficult task, which many may even describe as impossible. Even the very best antivirus programs are unable to do this correctly, as most of such programs will either delete the infected portion of the program or quarantine the file.
5. Ransomware
Ransomware today, is one of the more damaging forms of malware attacks. The name explains all you need to know. A cybercriminal carry’s out an attack that’s designed to encrypt your data, which in turn, blocks your access to it.
The hacker will then demand that you pay a ransom in order to access it again. And in many instances, even when the ransom is paid, the victim doesn’t get their data back.
Ransomware attacks can best be identified, when data on a victims system mysteriously starts being encrypted without authorisation from the user. Regularly backing up your data is one of the safest ways to protect yourself from these kinds of attacks.
To make things even more secure you can combine both endpoint security software which is designed to look for these specific unauthorised encryption attempts with regular backups. Oftentimes these kinds of security tools are even capable of rolling such an attack attempt back. Stopping it before it starts to consume your data.
6. Keyloggers
As implied by the name, keyloggers are used to monitor your keystrokes and other such activity, in order to steal confidential data like passwords. Keyloggers are actually legal programs, as they are used by companies to monitor their staff. It’s only when cybercriminals get a hold of them and use them for nefarious activity do they become an issue.
However, with keyloggers, cybercriminals don’t need to get the programs onto your system. Instead, they’ll use such tricks as, sending you an email, which looks like it came from your bank. However, when the end user clicks on the login page, they are instead, sent to a fake page, where the keylogger program has been installed. So, when the unsuspecting victim puts their login data into the page, this information is recorded and sent to the hacker.
Antivirus programs are capable of identifying and removing keyloggers from your system. If you work at a company that actually uses keylogger programs, then they will need to be allowlisted in the antivirus program, to stop it from identifying and removing it from the system.
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