They say that hindsight is 20/20, however, as far as we are concerned when it comes to cybersecurity in Ireland in 2020, foresight is crucial. With 2019 rapidly coming to an end, companies are already having to prepare for the cyber threats they’ll face, in a few short weeks in 2020 or even over the Christmas break which is, unfortunately, a popular time for such attacks.
Although attackers are constantly looking for new devious ways and techniques to attack and extract income from organisations, some older threats remain the most effective and lucrative as Irish businesses still fail to spend adequately on IT security and effective preventative maintenance.
What are some of the top cybersecurity threats to look out for in 2020?
A few of the biggest threats include:
1) Phishing/Social Engineering Attacks
2018 saw an enormous amount of phishing attacks against all kinds of targets. According to statistics reported by Small Business Trends, “1 in every 99 emails is a phishing attack.” And this amounts to 4.8 rogue emails per employee in a five-day work week.” Consider just how many emails are sent every single day—which is over 269 billion emails a day if statistics from respected business journal INC.COM are accurate. Furthermore, as stated by Small Business Trends, Close to a third or 30% of phishing emails make it past default security in organisations. Which is a staggering amount of risk for any organisation in 2020.
2) Ransomware
Ransomware attacks have been on the decline in general over the last year—at least, ransomware attacks targeting individuals are. As noted by ITPro Today, “The rate of detections within businesses rose from 2.8 million in the first quarter of 2018 to 9.5 million in the first quarter of 2019. That’s nearly a 340% increase in detections.”
One reason why businesses are being targeted more than private citizens now is that they have more money and motivation to pay ransoms. Another reason cited is that Bitcoin price has drastically dropped, where cybercriminals take over your PC and used it to mine/create bitcoin making attacks such as crypto mining less lucrative.
In 2020, ransomware is no less grave a threat than it ever was. Every day, Irish businesses face the risk of encryption malware making its way into their systems and destroying their data to add to this the latest variants of Ransomware now developed in the final quarter of 2019 leak company/client data to online forums if the business or organisation flat-out refuse to pay the ransom. This can have a more damaging impact on the organisations future viability than even the initial huge ransom.
3) Internal Attacks
One of the biggest ongoing cybersecurity threats faced by any type of Irish business is its own employees. The inside access that employees have, make them capable of inflicting great damage if they choose to abuse their access privileges maliciously for personal gain. Or, they may accidentally allow their user accounts to be compromised by attackers, or unknowingly download dangerous malware onto their company workstations.
Whether intentionally or by unwitting accident, the biggest risk to any cybersecurity architecture is from the employees who use network resources on a daily basis especially if there is no Cybersecurity, compliance plans and procedures in place.
Why Are Insider Attacks a Threat?
The reason why insider attacks remain one of the biggest cybersecurity threats to watch for year after year is that they have an enormous potential to cause damage. One disgruntled or careless employee can break your network security open wide enough to allow for a major data security and GDPR breach.
Additionally, these attacks can be hard to predict and prevent without thorough preparation by a suitably qualified and technically capable cybersecurity company.
Need help and guidance, guarding your business against the numerous cybersecurity threats it faces in 2020?