Right now we live in a time of transition to the digital world. It is becoming more and more common to have a cloud service, remote work and connect more devices to the Internet. This is opening up more attack vectors for cybercriminals to reap their profits. Thus, the increase in ransomware, Phishing, DDoS, social engineering, brute force attacks and more is increasingly appreciated. In this regard, both individuals and companies of any size are not free from being attacked at any time. In this article we are going to talk about how to prepare for cyber attacks.
Why should we care about attacks?
Technology is increasingly present in our lives, we have more and more computers connected to the network of networks and we also depend more on the Internet to work. Cyber attacks are occurring with increasing frequency and this is causing concern among companies and private users.
According to the security company Cybersecurity Ventures, these cyberattacks are going to cost the global economy $6 trillion a year by 2021. Although there are many ways to combat these types of attacks, we can do three things to protect our data. Here you have all the attacks that your network can suffer.
Reduces external attack surface
The external attack surface we can define it as any network interface where your device gives access to information or systems on your internal network. Behind the concept of external attack surface is that there are many points at which an attacker could potentially gain access to a target system. Cybersecurity experts in this regard would recommend two things:
- Keep the external attack surface as small as possible.
- Minimize, as far as possible, what is shared with others.
We achieve this by reducing vulnerable servers, systems and firewalls. Thus, they would only allow the minimum flow of traffic to be used for commercial purposes. In this case, we start from the premise that since we share less information, there is also less data to steal and fewer systems to attack.
The importance of security awareness
An important section for the prevention of cyber attacks is security awareness. Workers are a weak link from a safety point of view. Human error like starting an attack is a common thing.
For this reason, employees must be educated and provided with the necessary resources so that they can carry out their work efficiently and safely. This training must be continued over time and not on a one-off basis, for example, with awareness courses on Phishing attacks.
Assessing security flaws
In that aspect we must identify the security vulnerabilities of our company and mitigate them through software updates, updated network configurations and more. On the other hand, if we have a cybersecurity provider, we must make sure that they offer us a vulnerability assessment. It is certainly a good way to prevent cyber attacks.
The vulnerability analysis must be very complete and must have:
- A network scan to detect IP addresses, services, and features.
- Carrying out penetration tests or petesting to discover vulnerabilities in network configurations and infrastructure.
- Do a configuration audit to ensure systems and applications are properly configured.
- Carry out a vulnerability assessment of software, such as web browsers and other programs that we have installed.
Conclusions
Cyber attacks carry many threats to our businesses. In that aspect we have to do everything possible to prevent cyber attacks. Reducing the external attack surface, raising employee security awareness, and evaluating and correcting security flaws should be very important to businesses.
By implementing these measures now, you can save your organization a lot of money in the future. Cyber attacks lead to damage like file loss, temporary downtime, less profit and also your business loses reputation. Finally, you may be interested in knowing the most complete maps on threats and cyber attacks in the world.
