In the last few years, Cyber Security has worked a lot in its way to achieve the top business agenda. But, several reasons can be easily understood. Howsoever, it has been reported by the FBI that there is a nearly fourfold increase in the complaint raised for cyber security. Global losses are governed throughout the world via cybercrime which is considered to exceed $1 trillion in 2020. 

According to the “global risk report 2020,” it has been stated that chance of catching and prosecuting a cybercriminal is near about nil. Concerning the circumstances, business awareness and resilience are the two important keys that are used to secure sensitive data and avoid breaches. There are many ways to combat and keep the organization protected from any type of internet attack. With time, cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated and intense with the increased level of remote work as well as digital devices. Here are a few of the threats discussed that can cause damage for enterprises in current years.

ZERO-DAY VULNERABILITIES: 

This is the threat that refers to a hole in software that is unknown to the vendor. The security hole can easily be exploited by hackers before vendors are aware as well as hurries to fix the exploitation that is named a zero-day attack. It is found that a typical enterprise uses firewalls, intrusion-detection systems as well as antivirus software that is ideal to secure the mission-critical IT infrastructure. This is the system that is known to offer a good and first level of protection but even after the best efforts of security teams, the enterprise cannot be protected from zero-day exploits. The detailed info of the threat can only be gained after the threat gets identified. 

Howsoever, a good security team needs to have reliable, preventative security practices which must include real-time protection software that should be deployed with IPS (intrusion-prevention system for complete protection and even need to exercise well-planned incident response that could easily combat the security breaches. There should even be mechanism architecture in the network and infrastructure to prevent the spread of security breaches. 

Prevention of zero-day vulnerabilities:

First of all, one needs to patch their systems and the most commonly used unpatched and exploited programs are Java, adobe reader, and adobe flash. This has been a long way into practice but strangely none of the company that has been audited has ever met the program that is perfectly patched. Several signs are visible while the attack of zero-day exploits such as unexpected potential legitimate traffic or substantial scanning activity that is originated from the client or server and even similar behavior from all compromised clients or servers even after the application of the latest patches.  

Phishing Scams:

Phishing is the threat that is attempted with the focus to obtain sensitive information like username, password, and credit card details to accomplish malicious reasons. Scammers are involved in sending legitimate emails from trustworthy sources. It has been observed that phishing scams are fairly transparent as well as sophisticated users rarely fall prey to pop up asking for passwords. Howsoever, attacks soon comprise of the password text box that cloned over genuine ones to trick the users into delivering passwords to attackers. Google has currently adapted a special password alert feature that helps in protecting against future phishing attacks.  One of the best examples of phishing scams is a Nigerian scam that is called 419. 

There are various types of scams that are likely to be true but still people for the sake of money fall into the con of games. Many of the organizations have software that has the potential to filter out unsolicited emails. Such types of software are unreliable and emails are found to be dangerous to get through. Therefore, it is necessary to increase the awareness amongst the user community to identify unwanted emails. 

Prevention of phishing scams:

It is important to learn about the suspected phishing emails with the help of the qualities that can be identified as an attack via emails. Presence of the duplicate image of the real company and the email accompanied with the promotion of gift or loss of existing account. A few of the things that need to be counted are as followed:

• Check the source of incoming mails because banks are never going to ask for personal info as well as password or CVV number. 
• Never attempt to visit your bank website via clicking on the emails. 
• Never click on the hyperlinks or links that are attached to the emails because it could easily drag one to the fraudulent website. 
• Follow the perspective to enhance the security of the computer with the help of antivirus software. 
• Have a look at the recent updates available for the operating system and web browsers 
• Provide all the sensitive data in the secured platform only 
• Provide training to the staff in case of doubts so that no risk is entered. 

Ransomware:

Ransomware is a malware threat that has the potential to encrypt data, freezes it to stop its accessibility to demand money for the decryption key. Since it cannot be reversed, therefore there is only one way to save yourself that is to keep the backup of your files to avoid blackmailing. In case one does not have a separate and clean backup of files, then simply avoid fulfilling their demand as it completely bullies and even encourages them. 

Prevention for Ransomware:

As per the report, it has been concluded that ransom has increased to $1.4 billion in 2020. Ransomware is the third most popular malware type that can breach and is even employed in 22% of cases. In the year 2022, hackers compromised COVID-19 research data and demanded $14 million from the University of California, and later attacked the photography giant Canon. Moreover, in Germany, cybercriminals targeted hospitals for ransom with patient care systems that are being disabled and resulting in the death of one patient. This threat is combated similarly to phishing scams.  

Malware:

This is the threat that is referred to the entire mess of malicious software threats starting from Trojan horses to adware, scareware, spyware to get into the idea. This is present in a whole bunch of different forms, so it is important to make note of updating security software regularly, monitoring and scanning systems, and even do not need to access any sort of suspicious sites that could increase the risk of picking up something undesirable.  

Prevention for malware:

To combat the malware, the technique that is involved is similar to a phishing scam. 

DDoS:

DoS stands for Denial of service or DDoS means distributed denial of service. This is the cyber attack executor seeks for the creation of machine or network resource that is unavailable or temporary or render indefinite disrupting services of a host connected to the internet.  DoS is target by flooding the targeted machine or resource with the use of superfluous requests which attempt to overload systems that lead to prevention or legitimate requests for being fulfilled. DoS attack is compared to a group of people crowded to enter the shop or business causing disrupting normal operations. In a DDoS attack, incoming traffic floods the victim that originates from different sources. 

This is the major reason that makes the attack impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single IP address. Howsoever, it is difficult to distinguish legal user traffic from the attacked traffic because they are spread across all origin points.  There are majorly two general forms of DDoS attacks i.e. crash service and flood service and the most serious attack is distributed. It has been found that most of the attacks involve forging of IP sender addresses which are called IP address spoofing which makes the identification of the exact location of the attacking machine difficult with the only view that the attack cannot be defeated with the easy use of ingress filtering. 

Prevention for DDoS attacks:

To combat DDoS attacks is considered to be a nightmare. The combination of higher volume traffic clogging with the application-targeted techniques causes stealthy attacks to disrupt service for legal users or entire down networks. Howsoever, proper DDoS protection leads to a reduction of the impact of attack but, because none of the security solutions is 100% secured and effective. It is observed that working with providers who can easily guide one through the attack leads to alleviation of risk. 

Therefore, an automated approach is accomplished with the use of techniques such as scrubbing and blackholing which is considered to remove the bad traffic or re-routing as the effective solution. There is good software that has the potential to detect DDoS attacks and render protection and automate alleviation of large scale, SSL, or application targeted attacks in real-time i.e., defending the business from largest attacks over hundreds of GB per second.   

Conclusion:

Companies, as well as their employees, plunged into the remote working environment but in the case of several organizations, remote networking capabilities are not yet shielded. The shift has resulted in unsecured gaps that are found to act maliciously as well as exploit for financial gain. The technological changes have shaped the workplace to remain constant in the flow with the increasing cyber threat that the enterprises are facing. It is assumed by the majority of executives that the majority of the IT budget is spent on cyber resilience. Security teams develop stronger policies to fight back the cyber security challenges. But, this is the first step that one needs to effectively communicate the policies for the entire workforce and train employees to respond perfectly. 

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