Most worrisome threats to enterprise security -2020 forecast

As a business owner, you do not need anyone to tell you that one data breach can put you out of business. Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee full protection against every cyber-security threats out there. Even with a team of top expert IT specialists or sophisticated systems, the threat of the rapidly evolving tech landscape still forces them to adjust on a continuous basis.

Ultimately, the best protection against the ever-increasing sophistication and complications of technology threats is knowledge. And with 2019 getting ready to close its curtain, companies should start learning and preparing for cyber threats they will face in 2020.

This content will show you some of the top cyber-security threats to watch out this 2020.

1. Phishing Attacks

Generally not a new thing, phishing attacks have increased by about 250 percent this 2019. Meanwhile, new techs and increased accessibility to information are making these attacks more refined, increasing the likelihood of cyber-criminals successfully infiltrating your systems.

Regardless of every organizations’ best efforts, these attacks still make their way into employees’ inboxes. To help minimize the risk of attacks, you can provide training to your employees so that they can recognize phishing attempts as well as using custom anti-phishing solutions in the workplace.

2. Ransomware

Ransomware attacks have been decreasing over the last year, at least those attacks that target individuals. IT Pro Today revealed that ransomware incidents within businesses, however, rose from 2.8 million in early 2018 to an alarming 9.5million in early 2019. That is almost a 340 percent increase in detections.

The reason why businesses are being targeted now more than ever is that they have the money and motivation to pay for the ransoms.

To reduce the risk of ransomware, you will have to use strong perimeter security on your business such as firewalls. Also, each workstation should have a sophisticated antivirus program that can prevent attacks. Lastly, you can have a business disaster or continuity recovery plan in place which includes an offsite backup of all important business data to protect your organization against loss.

3. Internal Attacks

One of the most alarming cybersecurity threats faced by any enterprise is not the work of sophisticated cyber-criminals but by its own employees who use the network resources every day.

The inside access that employees have can make them capable of wreaking great damages if they choose to abuse their access privileges for personal gains. Or, they can also accidentally allow their user accounts to be breached or even download dangerous malware onto their workstation.

In order to minimize risk of internal attacks, you can use a policy of least privilege in order to limit what systems and resources any user can access to the minimum that is required of their job. That way, either intentional or accidental, the damage can be kept at a minimum.

Also, you can revoke the access privileges of a user account once it has been breached in order to contain the attack and prevent the account from being used and do more damage in the future.

4. Out-of-date Devices

You might be familiar with the benefits of IoT or Internet of Things— the increasing plethora of smaller devices (mostly) connected to wireless networks, from security cameras and smart locks to industrial sensors.

However, endpoint devices and IoT pose an ever-increasing threat to enterprise security, since they are usually non-standardized, does not have built-in security and are quite difficult to update— but have enough capability to be hacked, giving hackers access to a wider company data and networks.

In one example of what can go wrong with IoT devices, the biggest internet stability incidents from recent years were because of the Mirai botnet that breached digital video recorders and internet-connected CCTV cameras.

To prevent this, you need to regularly update all business software, preferably in line with the publisher’s recommended schedule of an upgrade. Don’t wait too long or you risk outlasting the publisher’s allotted lifecycle. At some point, they will simply stop releasing updated and patches for older versions, leaving their products vulnerable to breaches.

Maxwell Donovan is writer of this article. He writes about cybersecurity but works in the Conference production industry. His prime errand is to discover the right group of delegates for the gatherings and different business meetings. You can find him at Twitter, Facebook.