Neglecting your company’s cybersecurity can seriously damage your business. If you rely on funding from investors, most of them, only naturally, lose interest in vulnerable, pirated or cyber-attacked companies. The scandal that erupted over two major data breaches at Yahoo®, affecting a billion users, almost derailed Verizon®’s offer to acquire Yahoo. As a result, the offer was reduced by $350 million in the final transaction.
Cyber threats do not only target large international companies with millions of users. Small firms also need to protect their business and user data. According to Symantec®, the number of cybercrimes targeting small firms increased from 18% in 2011 to 43% in 2015. A figure that clearly show that your company quite simply cannot afford to ignore cybersecurity.
Find out here which types of cyberattacks are most frequent and how to prevent them.
Ransomware attacks
„Ransomware“ is the name of a very common cyberattack, one that is gaining ground from year to year, especially among small businesses. By the end of this year, the total number of victims of ransomware attacks will have increased significantly. We already know that a new ransomware attack will take place every 40 seconds. So the next victim could well be you
As its name implies, hackers access your data and hold it hostage until you pay a ransom. Unfortunately, they prefer small businesses for two reasons:
their security is often patchier.
compared to large companies, there is a higher probability of them paying the ransom.
It is better to prevent the attacks in the first place by securing your website as much as possible.
Phishing attacks
We cannot talk about cyberattacks without referring to threats by „phishing“. Its principle is simple: a malicious person sends you a virus-infested email. Once you open it, it can access your network and all the information stored on it. If they access your database, they could get their hands on the data related to your company, its employees and even your customers.
According to one study, there are about 400 phishing scams per day, and 1/3 of them are successful. Small and medium-sized enterprises are their main victims. Fortunately, your messaging tool already intercepts the majority of these emails via the spam email or junk-email folder.
More recent versions that we should also be aware of are „vishing“ and „smishing“, the same attack, but by phone and text message.
DDoS attacks
While many may consider them a thing of the past, DDoS attacks are still commonly launched by hackers today. In fact, these kinds of attacks doubled in 2017 and went from strength to strength in 2018 and 2019. 20% of the victims were small websites.
Not only do DDoS attacks compromise your data, but can also impact the quality of your service. Designed to crash your server or your host’s servers, in the long run, they could slow down the site or even make it inaccessible. This site malfunction blocks your conversions. The consequences are therefore not limited to the loss of data but extend to the loss of customers and revenue.
Supply chain attacks
As a web professional, you can protect yourself from many cyberattacks. However, the companies you work with may not be as secure as you are. This includes your suppliers, web host, delivery company or cloud-based SaaS products integrated into your company.
Supply chain attacks occur when hackers succeed in violating the security of your connections with third parties. They do not need to access your systems directly to target you. Since the companies you deal with have certain data, their access can compromise your security. Recent studies have shown that up to 30% of all cyber security breaches by online merchants are due to third-party vulnerabilities.
Refund-related fraud
E-commerce sites should also be wary of fraud related to refund claims. The solution here would be to establish a clear return policy on the site.
Although this policy is designed to protect your business from dishonest customers and fraudsters, hackers have still found loopholes that allow them to make profits at your expense. Return and refund fraud can take place in three possible ways:
the use of a forged receipt to obtain a refund for products that have never even been purchased,
the request for reimbursement on products that have actually been delivered, but that the customer claims never to have received,
claiming reimbursement on purchases made with stolen credit cards.
Being alert to the latest dishonest practices helps to avoid most of them in general.
The problem of defacement
The problem of defacement is probably the worst of these attacks, as hackers take over your home page or a specific page on your website to publish something else. Imagine having naked women, political propaganda or a request for a donation to a phoney NGO appear instead of your content. This type of cyberattack is often similar to an act of online vandalism.To stave off defacement, there is only one solution: monitoring.
How to protect yourself against defacement?
InternetVista offers you its monitoring service to limit the damage caused by defacement. How to prevent it? By monitoring the content downloadedonto your site. All you have to do is define a sentence to check on your site to know that it is displaying your content correctly or that a hacker has taken possession of it. This monitoring system alerts you as soon as it detects that the defined sentence is no longer on your page or that a word from your blacklist is on it.
In addition to checking the downloaded content, InternetVista has set up a mechanism to check that a page has not been modified.
Thanks to monitoring, you are also aware of everything that happens on your site, even when it is down.
