… and how to stop them from happening before it’s too late.

As one of Dubai’s leading IT firms, we’re no strangers to the threats that modern-day businesses face from cyber security attacks on a daily basis.

For the attackers, pulling off a successful assault on a business’ IT systems, whether to gain sensitive information, or for another reason, can be very lucrative and financially rewarding. That’s why they’re seemingly so common - and therefore also why it’s necessary to protect against them, and ensure your team remains aware of them, before they can even happen.

And, with a large proportion of workers still connecting remotely to businesses and work from home (thanks, COVID), it’s now more important than ever to make sure you’re keeping on your toes at all times, So without further ado, here are the top five threats facing businesses today - and how you’re able to limit (or stop entirely) the exponential damage they can cause:

Ransomware Attacks

You’ll often hear horror stories about how businesses and public organisations can be held hostage by ransomware attacks, and face a simple choice: pay up, or lose a substantial proportion of your irreplaceable (and often very sensitive) data. When these happen to any company, it can quickly become a nightmare - paralysing the business’ day-to-day operations in an instant, whereby panic sets in and they’re forced to pay.

And they can be very costly to solve, too. The average ‘ransom’ for a ransomware attack, for instance, comes in at around £95,000, which, for small businesses, is not a small sum of money to write off as a minor expense. Therefore, businesses should ensure that they’ve very strong Endpoint Protection across all systems and devices in their network, and set up a routine backup process of all company data so that they’re able to simply ‘roll-back’ to a given date before the ransomware attack occurred.

Malware Attacks

The term ‘malware’ covers a variety of infectious software and code, usually created with the sole malicious intention of stealing data, gaining access to networks, or stripping away sections of infrastructure that stops systems working entirely. You’ve heard of spyware, viruses, and trojan malware, which are all things that attackers will use to hurt your systems.

In short, they’re bad news. But how can they be stopped?

Well, it often comes down to technological defence. For one, you can make sure that you’re encrypting all of your company’s data, as well as ensure you’re frequently backing up important files. Additionally, IT teams should be regularly updating software and applications, as well as educating the rest of the team about the threat Malware poses. And of course, there’s always the obvious method of installing Antivirus software on each machine, which will scan and detect malicious files (hopefully) before they can inflict damage.

Phishing

Phishing attempts can use ingenious (or also incredibly basic) techniques to make users believe they're browsing a familiar page, or speaking to a trusted contact, in order to click an unsafe link or download malicious files. The reality is that by design, phishing attacks will be made to appear as life-like as real company emails and web pages as possible - making it difficult for many to recognise their falseness.

Aside from focussing on identifying phishing attempts when putting staff through Security Awareness Training, companies will often go the extra mile by ensuring that a professional email security gateway is in place in their system, to stop these malicious emails from reaching company inboxes in the first place. In fact, many organisations will routinely send simulated phishing emails to team members on purpose to see if they pass or fail the test - and make them aware of the dangers to prevent them falling for the real thing.

Weak Passwords

Although, yes, it’s the most obvious form of attack, you’d be incredibly surprised how often weak, overused, and insecure passwords are the reason that many businesses fall prey to data breaches. In fact, a whopping 81% of all data breaches come down to poor password security. But we often ask ourselves: It’s 2022, so how can this still be happening? It’s not like the internet is still a new, unfamiliar concept to us all - but again, you’d be surprised at the complacency many hold when it comes to passwords.

On the bright side, overcoming this particular threat is therefore arguably the easiest. For instance, it can be as simple as using a reliable, free, secure password manager such as LastPass (www.lastpass.com) to generate, store, and manage all of your random string passwords for each service and login.

Here at Resolution IT Dubai, we have a very important saying that we like to repeat over and over to our clients:

‘You need to be proactive - not reactive.’

Don’t even give attacks the chance to occur, but instead remain one step ahead at all times.

And that’s where we come in. 

We’re even offering a free consultation to allow you to better understand the IT landscape of the modern world, and see firsthand how Resolution IT can bring immense value to your IT systems in almost every way.

So why wait? Get in touch with a member of the team today.

‘Book in your free consultation’

Call: +971 (0) 4 451 7919 / Click: resolutionit.ae/contact / Email: info@resolutionit.ae