Are We Practicing Cyber Security?
Cyber Security Expert & Speaker Muhammad Adeel Javaid has written an excellent article on cyber security for the coming year. It covers many areas that we do not normally consider when assessing our security solutions.
There are three things he has discussed that are especially interesting to me and are applicable to many people and companies that we work with. With these three points alone, it gives us good reasons to pay attention to what is happening. even in our daily lives.
Adeel writes:
1) “Targets shift from “big win” to “volume-based.” As the hackers have gotten more sophisticated, cyber security has evolved to protect against them. But who is buying and using the high-cost products on the market? The large enterprises that have the budgets to protect themselves.
So where does that leave the 70 million SMBs that can’t increase their security budgets to $1 million a year? Year 2015 will see the target of cyber attacks shift even more than in the past. The focus on the SMB has been increasing, and the delta between protection of SMBs and large enterprises has grown tremendously because of cost and complexity.
In 2015, we’ll see a rapid shift of malware targeting the SMB as hackers begin to focus on volume rather than the large company targets. This will be due in part to larger enterprises being more difficult to penetrate, but also because the time between breach and detection is often days – if not weeks – longer in a smaller organization.”
What this says to me is that if you are an SMB be sure to reassess your cyber security measures. Contact a trusted source and with the help of a good company in your area, review your security plan, backups, and business continuity plans. Use your time and energy proactively instead of reactively.
2) “Home appliances that are connected to the Internet will become the target of hackers. We have already seen a so called “smart refrigerator” that fell victim to hackers and was used in a cyber attack. Now hackers will penetrate these devices, change their settings, cause malfunctions and in some cases use them as a component of a larger cyber attack that receives much greater attention.”
When you are attending the large home shows to see the latest products and watching television with the enticing commercials of ways to manage your entire life from your fingertips remember that these are just more ways you leave yourself open to attack. Again, there are ways to mitigate the risks, so contact a professional for help.
3) “Password re-use Attack Will Increase. It is well documented that following each major password dump by the criminals a wave of secondary “password guessing” attacks hits large enterprises. This process will gain prevalence and criminal tools will automate the “guess scanning” of any new password from any source, whether Breach, Malware, or Phishing.”
Changing passwords frequently and NOT using them in other sites is one way to make it harder for cyber criminals to access your information, however with intense efforts of the wrong people almost anything can be hacked. You can certainly make it harder by not leaving your door wide open for them.
You may read Adeel’s entire article here: