Consumers and their low-value digital assets are no more the targets of cyberattackers, now they are into big tasks that can beget big Ransome. Many federal institutions, including municipal, local, and state government organizations, have already paid huge Ransomes.
As we are getting native to innovative technologies, new forms of cybersecurity threats are also evolving alongside. And it seems as time pass by there pattern of attacks and interest areas are changing drastically. Cyber fraudsters are launching new forms of attacks.
In 2019, cyber attackers were reached new heights by attacking anything that comes in front fo their ravaging journey. Businesses, federal websites, banking institutions, and educational hubs and a lot more become victimized ruthlessly and led many institutions to mull over a cyber insurance policy.
However, as time moves toward 2020, attackers are finding novice modes to seep into the IT systems of the organization. Above that, in light of the outbreak of the COVID-19, the rate of cybersecurity threats is hitting new records around the world.
For example, the WHO (world health organization) has faced a severs security breach by some infamous cyber-criminals in the early days of March this year. Flavio Aggio, Chief Information Security Officer at the WHO, confirmed that the fake WHO website spotted by Urbelis (a cybersecurity expert) had been used in an attempt to steal passwords from multiple agency staff.
The new trends in cyberattacks are more focused on businesses and multi-level organizations on a large scale. Unlike the last years, they avert their attention from the consumers to entities increasingly.
It has reported that phishing attempts have risen to 600% in the few couples of months from Feb 2020.
To illustrate, 2019 data breach investigation reports says, more than 90% of cybersecurity threats are through emails. Eyal Benishti, CEO of Ironscales, attests to the claim and says, today, the primary source of cybersecurity threats towards organizations is through emails.
But why? Why are emails more prone to cybersecurity threats?
Experts say that one of the prime reasons that the attackers are targeting email because it is the most used business communication mode. It is estimated that more than 3.7 billion users leverage email services for their business correspondence. Plus, on an average, 269 billion emails are sent every single day. So there is nothing to surprise why emails are getting targeted.
Another loop that the attackers have on email is the lack of cybersecurity knowledge among the users. Most of the end-users in a business setting fail to identify an infectious email.
In Australia alone, the attackers looted $61.6 million by different kinds of investment phishing emails last year.
A report says domain registrars are stoping automatic domain registrations of domain names that are linked to COVID-19 for many attackers are creating phishing websites to trap users in the guise of legitimate organizations.
Today, phishing emails are arriving with a more convincing appearance and luring the users to click the links as soon as they receive it. The conventional rule-based email moderation and manual filtering efforts are failing to stop this threat. Hence, companies are encountering new cybersecurity challenges seeking more sophisticated AI-based solutions to combat this peril in real-time.
As new types of phishing attacks such as phaxttachment, spear-phishing, whaling, clone phishing, domain spoofing, HTTPS phishing are spreading and becoming more targeted in nature, businesses have to frame out adequate measures such as email signing certificates. You can get it from an authentic SSL certificate provider.
This is a new sort of phishing practice that tries to victimize the users randomly, unlike email phishing. These kinds of phishing websites will be released across popular platforms and app stores with fake claims.
As its random nature and broad reachability, more users are prone to get victimized on this. A valid report revealed that in January, Google registered 149000 phishing websites, and the number has doubled to 293000 in the month of February. Surprisingly, over the month of March, the number of phishing websites are found to be increased to350%, which collectively amounted to 522000 and counting.
Unbelievably, when the world goes to lockdown, the number of phishing attacks are a whoopingly increasing inhumanly.
Rachel Welch, Atlas VPN COO, says, "I believe that hackers identified coronavirus as something users are desperate to find information on." Cyberfrauds are taking advantage of the desperate situations of people mercilessly.
Cloned applications and websites with misspelled domain that resembles reputed applications and sites are mostly using for these sorts of the phishing attack. The users who are being increasingly vulnerable fails to attend the potential threat in such strange websites.
These phishing websites and applications can cause severe damage to the users and steal sensitive information from the devices. Thus, business organizations have to deploy stringent cybersecurity strategies to handle the situation.
Unawareness of new forms of cybersecurity threats and lack of training is the prominent causes of getting victimized to such frauds. Hence, giving cybersecurity threat detection training is the most practical solution we have to mitigate this peril. In addition, employing meticulous network monitoring systems and updating systems patches across the infrastructure will help to protect from the additional damages from the treats.
There are a few more best practices to follow that assures a threat-free business and organizational operation. One is RBI (remote browser isolation) that blocks the attackers' way to the end-devices, and deploying zero-trust policy across the organization also helps to verify every email and link that connects to the network infrastructure. However, if your organization is too busy in other business operations, it is always better to hire a managed IT service provider to take care of your IT security best practices.
