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As more of your business activities are becoming digital, cybersecurity becomes even more critical to protecting reputation, revenues, and customer trust. But, do you know about Cyber Security Threats? Are your operations and systems being protected? You may have heard the term “Cyber Security Threat” in media, or you may have got any pop-up alert on your smartphone with warnings. Do you know the reasons for hacking in countries? Do you know where do cyber threats come from? Have you ever heard about Cyber Threats? If not, you’re at the right place as we’re going to provide you a list of the top 12 cyber security threats for 2021 that you can check below, especially if you want to protect your business from cybercrime.
Table of Contents
Top Cyber Security Threats are:
Malware Attacks
Software that performs a malicious task on a target network or device, such as corrupting data or gaining control of a system, is called Malware. Malware is described as malicious software, including ransomware, spyware, worms, and viruses, which gets installed into the system when the user clicks on dangerous emails or links. Thus, Malware Attacks are one of the common types of cyber security threats that aim to block access to essential components of the network, gather confidential information, damage the system, or can be happened inside the system due to a number of reasons.
For example,
- Infecting computers and utilizing them to mine bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
- Stealing consumer’s financial data or credit card data or details.
- Taking control of various computers in order to launch denial-of-service attacks against other networks.
Phishing Attacks
Phishing attacks are email-borne attacks that are performed to play a trick with email recipients so that they can disclose their confidential information or get ready to download malware by clicking on a hyperlink in the message. The common objective of cybercriminals for phishing attacks is to obtain sensitive information from users, such as banking and credit card details, personally identifiable information, and passwords.
Common Types of Phishing Attacks are:
- Email phishing
- Link manipulation
- CEO fraud
- Spear phishing
- Fake websites
Insider Attacks
Insider Attacks are one of the top cyber security threats that you need to check out in 2021 as many employees are working from home and they have access to sensitive information of their organizations which they can misuse if organizations don’t take any action to protect their software with security testing services and QA. Insider Attacks are committed by people, especially former employees, business partners, vendors, or contractors, by having legitimate access to organizations’ systems and networks intentionally or unintentionally to leak sensitive information and gain personal benefits.
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks
Denial of Service attacks aims at flooding networks, systems, or servers with a huge amount of traffic so that it becomes difficult for the system to fulfill legitimate requests. Attacks can even utilize numerous infected devices to launch an attack on the target system. This type of attack happens when multiple machines run together to attack one target. Distributed Denial of Service Attacks use botnets, which is a group of hijacked internets connected devices to commit cybercrime. Protecting the systems, networks, or servers with software testing services and QA are important. Otherwise, attackers can take advantage of device weaknesses and security vulnerabilities to control software or numerous devices using commands.
Cloud Breaches
Usually, Cloud Infrastructure is very secure, and it allows customers to implement cyber security features and configure them correctly. However, cloud misconfigurations are a common cause of data breaches. You can watch these breaches or cyber security threats in 2021 as more businesses use cloud services to support remote workers.
Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware is a kind of malware in which attackers take control of your files in the infected system and demand a hefty amount of money from you. Criminals can encrypt or lock the victim’s data or blocks access to the data until a ransom is paid. There are several strategies to deal with such attacks. Security is the major concern for all cyber security threats. For this, you can enable the firewall in your system to protect malware from being uploaded into your system. In addition, you can hire the software testing company to detect ransomware attacks faster and prevent your system from damage. Apart from that, you need to consider antivirus software to achieve a maximum level of protection for your important data and files.
Man-in-the-middle attack
A Man-in-the-middle attack is one of the common cyber security threats that you can expect to rise in 2021. In this attack, attackers try to intercept communications between two parties secretly to modify traffic or collect data from both parties. Detecting Man-in-the-middle attacks are challenging, yet they are preventable with security testing services. These attacks can be used to steal the personal information of users, their login credentials, corrupt data, or spy on the victim.
Data Erasure
Data Erasure is defined as Data Wiping, Data Clearing, Data Destruction, which is a software-based method used by criminals to overwrite the data so that it becomes possible to eliminate or destroy all information from hard disk drives, electronic data storage software, other storage devices.
DNS Tunneling
DNS Tunneling is a cyber-attack method that aims to encode the data of other programs, DNS queries-based protocols and responses. It involves data payloads that one can add to an attacked DNS server and use this method for taking control of remover servers and applications. The DNS (Domain Name System) protocol is a widely trusted and used protocol on the internet. However, the purpose of committing DNS tunneling attacks is to abuse this protocol to steal malicious traffic through an organization’s defenses. By leveraging DNS servers and malicious domains, criminals can use DNS to perform data exfiltration and evade network defenses.
SQL Injection
SQL Injection is one of the top cyber security threats to watch out for in 2021 as mostly all organizations have databases where their store records of their customers and clients. For example, a database can include information about business expenses, sales, and finances. Therefore, to destroy your database, attackers use the code injection technique that is known as SQL Injection. SQL Injection is the web hacking technique in which hackers place the malicious code in SQL statements to take access to your backend data or databases. For this, the software testing company should have domain expertise to find a SQL injection vulnerability and fix the issues that occur in the database SQL queries. Besides, a successful security testing service can help you protect your system from unauthorized users who try to access or manipulate data in the database.
Password Cracking
It is another threat facing by small businesses because their employees use easily guessable or weak passwords. Today, cloud-based services are highly used for small businesses, and one needs to make and maintain various accounts to store the company’s sensitive data and financial information. Employing the same passwords or easily guessed passwords for multiple accounts allows hackers to steal this data. Moreover, hackers are very smart and intelligent in guessing weak passwords, and they know how to misuse the company’s legal data. Therefore, it is always recommended to choose a password that contains a combination of letters, characters, and numbers.
Unpatched Vulnerabilities
Unpatched vulnerabilities or bugs are another reason for increasing cyber-attacks because most businesses operate through online technologies and custom-based software. If the software has bugs and is not carefully fixed by the software testing company, then it can give an opportunity to attackers to commit a cybercrime. Unpatched Vulnerabilities are security glitches or flaws in the programming of an operating system or a computer system that supports attackers to cause harm.
Conclusion
In a post-COVID-19 world, companies are becoming more digital-focused to achieve a competitive advantage and serve their customers the best level of service. However, launching the real-time software and web application within few weeks has become the utmost priority. Speed has become a common trait for expanding the digital footprint. Owing to this, the extent of exposure to outside cyber security threats is increasing exponentially. Thus, protecting the critical business data from vulnerable attacks is a big challenge, yet possible with cybersecurity testing that is a kind of software testing aids in minimizing threats, risks, and any glitches from the software application. With cyber security testing services, one can easily establish trust with the clientele, gain valuable insights into your digital systems, identify and address system vulnerabilities to run the business operations with 100% safety.
