One trend in cybersecurity that never changes is that it’s getting more important with every passing year. According to statistics, the number of cyberattacks and severity of the losses they incur are growing at an alarming rate. Every day about 24,000 of malicious mobile apps get blocked yet more pop up overnight. For a business today cybersecurity isn’t an option, it’s a necessary measure one needs to invest in heavily. And it’s essential to follow the trends and developments in this industry to stay on top of the latest changes.
3 Cybersecurity Trends You Should Keep an Eye on Today
1. Triple up the vigilance for phishing threats
The number of phishing attacks has increased by 300% in 2018 and will only get bigger in 2019. This is the most common type of cyberattack today. Therefore, this is the one you must ward against the most. The hackers who use this form of attack have progressed greatly beyond poorly-constructed phishing emails. As they are getting more sophisticated, so should your security system be as well.
Those who want to protect themselves from phishing attacks today need to follow the news about the threat evolution. Even the sources you trust might be hacked, so you need to have security in place that will screen every email for any malicious file extensions. Companies should be using phishing simulators to raise awareness among employees and try to predict potential attacks.
2. Manage the unmanaged
The popularity of third party solutions grows and your vulnerabilities grow along with it. Today everyone knows that they need secure website hosting but you also know that you need to install additional security apps to protect you from threats that can get through your host.
But do you use the same additional protections for all your IoT devices and apps that are hosted on third party servers? Every endpoint like this is a vulnerability in your system and hackers exploit them with increasing frequency.
The worst thing is that it’s nearly impossible to protect yourself from all threats that come from this direction. Therefore, you need to be extremely thorough in researching the providers of such services to ascertain their own security. You should also keep up to date with the developments in this field and upgrade your own security solutions as soon as improvements become available.
3. Tighten up the user access to purge shadow threats
According to Gartner research, by 2020 a third of all hacker attacks will come through shadow IT resources. Those are apps that run on your hardware without prior approval by the enterprise IT. This means that the origin of the vulnerability are users.
This threat grows bigger in response to the rising popularity of SaaS solutions. User security is getting lax as they get more freedom, which means that they also create more weaknesses in your system.
Monitoring of device permissions and tight control of user access rights are essential for reducing this particular security risk. Unfortunately, neither offers guaranteed protection. Therefore, you also need to add user education and training to the mix.
Remember that people often create security breaches without any malicious intent. They simply don’t know any better and might be unaware of what their actions might result in. In order to deal with this problem, one must provide proper user education.
Including basic cybersecurity guidelines in the company’s onboarding package isn’t enough in this case. Instead, one needs to organize seminars and training that will teach every person in the team how to minimize cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Raising of the user awareness for possible threats is another trend that you should be supporting today. A business should definitely include an overview of the latest cybersecurity news and developments into the email newsletters sent out to employees regularly.
