Types of Cyberattacks

In today’s interconnected digital landscape, the threat of cyberattacks get’s bigger and bigger. With malicious hackers crafting and coming up with new ways to compromise systems and steal valuable information. Some common cyber-attacks are:

1. Phishing Attacks:
   • Phishing attacks in simple terms is acting to be someone to gain sensitive information.
   • Phishing includes sending deceptive emails or messages to get someone to expose sensitive information like passwords etc.
2. Malware Attacks
   • Malware attacks in simple terms is malicious software that is hidden behind another ‘what looks’ to be legit software.
   • Malware is malicious software created to damage or gain unauthorised access to systems.
   • With malware we are looking at viruses, worms, ransomware etc.
3. Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks:
   • DDos attacks in simple terms is flooding a targeted systems or network with excessive traffic.
4. SQL Injection:
   • SQL Injection in simple terms is writing malicious SQL code into input fields, giving attackers access to manipulate databases.
   • Such can escalate to unauthorised access to sensitive information or modification/deletion of database records.
5. Zero-Day Exploits:
   • Zero-Day exploits in simple terms are exploits to a targeted software’s vulnerability which is not known to the vendor.

Security Measures:

In today’s world where our lives and livelihoods are increasingly intertwined with technology, protecting and safeguarding ourselves has become the most important thing to practice.

When building systems there are several things that one should think about such as:

1. Encryption
   • This ensure that all sensitive information is encrypted such as passwords, personal messages etc.
   • This ensures that the connection & communication between clients and server is secured and makes the system not prone to Man in The Middle Attacks (MITM Attacks)
2. Access Control
   • Ensuring that a system is in place that can grant, identify & revoke access.
   • Ensuring accounts that should have access to certain parts of a system only have that access and nothing more or less.
3. Intrusion detection systems (IDS)
   • Having systems that would be able to pickup potential threats such being able to write text serialisation algorithm to serialise text that is typed into an input field that might have malicious code.
   • Having systems in place that would be scanning through networks for any sign of unauthorized access or malicious activity. IDS’s can provide early warning signs of potential security breaches, allowing and organisation before any critical damages are incurred for a response and mitigation action to take place.
   • There are two main categories of IDS:
     • Network-based Intrusion detection systems.
       • This type of IDS is responsible for monitoring network traffic, analysing packets as they move through the network infrastructure.
     • Host-based Intrusion detection systems.
       • This type of IDS is responsible for monitoring activities such as file system changes and process executions.

Impact of Cyberattacks

With just a single click chaos, disruption towards business, economies and compromising of personal data can occur in a single cyber-attack.

1. Impact on Organizations
   • Financial loss
     • Losing the money that could have been made during down-time.
     • The cost that will come with the remediation that will be made.
   • Reputation damage
     • Such incidents can hurt an organisation credibility resulting to loss of customers.
   • Operation disruption:
     • Such an incident can disrupt the normal business operations, which can lead to long-term damage in business continuity.
2. Impact on the Economy
   • Business Ecosystem disruption
     • Such an incident can disrupt interconnected network businesses which cascades effects on the economy.
     • Intellectual property loss
       • Cyberattacks can result in theft of valuable IP.
     • Decreased customer confidence.
       • Customers confidence will decline gradually, and this will impact the customer confidence to spend.
3. Impact on society
   • ID Theft
     • In certain circumstances personal information of people can be compromised.
     • Emotional Distress:
       • Anxiety can be the most common feeling people have during cyber-attacks and many more.
     • Financial Loss:
       • Given a case where a malicious hacker gains unauthorised access to bank accounts, bank card information or even extortion request.

Incident Response

The current cybersecurity landscape requires a team in case of a breach to react quickly and effectively as this can be the difference between mitigating small damages than having to deal with large damages. By responding quickly to incidents, organisations can minimise losses, mitigate exploited vulnerabilities, restore services.

Incident response helps vendors to:

1. Always ready for the known and unknown.
2. Swiftly identify security incidents.
3. Cultivating best practices to block exploits before more damage is incurred

A process in flow is very important so you can effectively and quickly resolve the issue to get back in business.

Cyber Security Awareness

We live in a world whereby close to everything that revolves around is digital, where malicious hackers are daily trying to find ways to gain access. Everyone needs to be cyber aware to protect themselves. Below are some of the few things that people can practice on a day-to-day basis so to protect themselves:

1. Clicking unknown links
   • It’s best that one can avoid clicking on links if they are coming from a source that they do not know or it’s a link they do not recognize the domain or finds the domain name to be a bit off.
2. Vpn use.
   • If you know that you are some that is always using public Wi-Fi and dealing with sensitive data or information, it’s best to use Vpn so to protect yourself on the internet.
3. Secure passwords
   • Everyone needs to practice writing secure passwords for their accounts that they create online; this is due to the amount of brute force tools that are there and given that a password isn’t strong enough it can be cracked by those tools use by malicious hackers.
4. Social Engineering detection skills
   • It’s very important that organisations that are dealing with client sensitive information are well trained to so not be prone to social engineering securing their clients information and most importantly their reputation.
   • Software end users as well are to be educated of this as well because they are also vulnerable to such cyber-attacks.
     • Software end users are to be vigilant when using the internet for instance social accounts like Instagram, WhatsApp etc, a instance can occur where a person you knows social account is compromised and a message is sent to you asking money etc.
     • From an end user’s perspective, it will always be hard to know if someone they know social account has been compromised, however one can always see or notice difference in communication of how the person they know will normally communicate
     • End users can up to date from awareness raisers on recent scams that people on the internet are doing impersonating someone they are not. This way one can be able to recognise patterns of how these people operate.
     • Setting up 2 Factor Auth on all your accounts
     • As an end user if you do feel like you are hacked it best rather to create fraud alerts earlier before the situation escalates to a point it shouldn’t have.

Future Trends

As the years go, we can see the rise of AI & Blockchain in the tech ecosystem, both this 2 domains are showing & can play more important roles in improving Cyber Security.

Blockchain:

• With blockchain we are dealing with immutable records this ensures data integrity
• Decentralised blockchain networks distributes data across multiple nodes, making systems less prone to DDoS attacks.

AI:

• AI is a very great tool for threat detection as AI is good in patter recognition which at times will be more of the same patter malicious hackers use.
• AI can also be a very brilliant tool for user behaviour analysis to detect unusual login attempts, data access etc.