Recent data breaches have shown that most businesses are at risk of cyber attacks at any moment.
A cyberattack is the deliberate exploitation of your network or system. This attack can come in the form of a malicious code that targets to compromise your digital assets, data and steal or leak information to the outside.
For every business that looks forward to growing, having a reliable security team with hacks to curb cyberattacks is necessary. Preventing and dealing with cyber attacks is essential for any large organization.
This article shows you how your security team can handle cyberattacks to ensure your business remains on track.
1. Staff training
You should train your staff to identify cyber threats and handle them before affecting the entire system. Most cybercriminals would typically get to your system through your team.
They can send emails with fraudulent content or ask employees for personal details to access your system. Therefore, training your employees on protecting themselves and the system from a cyber attack can help a lot. Your team needs to:
- Keep checking all their emails in their inbox before opening them
- Check that all the links are secure before clicking them
- Apply common sense before sharing any information with strangers
2. Red teaming
If you want your company or business to stay free from cyber attacks, you should practice red team tactics. Red teaming is an activity that requires a detailed view of a company from an adversary’s perspective.
The ideology of conducting a red team assessment is to discover how real-world attackers can combine seemingly different exploits to succeed.
Here are some ways red team assessors can uncover all the risks in your organization:
- Application layer exploitation: most attackers would look at the web application in an organization when they want to launch an attack. By exploiting web application vulnerabilities, you give hackers room to control their attacks.
- Phone and email-based social engineering: Phishing can become more conniving when research is done on every individual in an organization.
- Information gathering: the security team collects all information on API endpoints, breached credentials, contact numbers, embedded systems, and many others.
- Planning and mapping the attack: the team maps all types of cyberattacks that they can approach for execution. Some factors to include in the process are network risks, hidden sub-domains, and checking for weak credentials.
- Penetration testing: at this point, the team executes the attacks. All the collected information acts as a guide to any attack on the system. Most of the attacks will normally affect the system through mapped security, client-based applications, and access to servers.
- Report and documentation: This is the final stage in red teaming that seeks to analyze the assessment outcomes. This report will outline all the cyberattacks conducted in the system and how they will likely impact the organization.
3. Software and system updates
Your system is at risk of a cyberattack because you don’t keep it up to date. When you don’t have updated software, you leave your system vulnerable to hackers. Most hackers will generally exploit the weaknesses in approach to access confidential data.
You should ask your team to install antivirus, use the best VPNs, and update the software to the latest versions to protect your system. Invest in quality patch management that can manage all your software and system updates.
Final Thoughts
Your security team can combat cyberattacks if there is proper education on how to deal with cyber threats. As a business, you should also take necessary precautions to curb all risks and vulnerabilities in the system. Apply the tips shared here to keep your organization safe from cyber attacks.
