Phishing and ransomware costs an average of $4.5 million to businesses in data breaches every year and today more than ever, every organization is a reachable target for cyber-crime increasing loss in brand, reputation, and revenue.
Deloitte Center for Controllership poll reflected that 48.8% of companies executives forecast an increase in cyber events in the next 12 months on accounting and financial data. The measure shows 22% of polled executives has experienced at least one cyber-attack and 12.5% more than one.
Crowdstrike 2023 Global Threat Report indicates that digital ecosystem has experienced a 50% increase in interactive intrusion campaigns targeting technology, financial, healthcare and communications as primary targets based on the type of data these industries handle customer sensitive information and financial records. Cybersecurity Ventures estimates an increase in cyber-crime that will reach nearly $8 trillion by the end of this year triggered by security breaches and user targeted events.
Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning are becoming standard technologies in all industries. Tools like ChatGPT has seen a exponential adoption for research and analytics. In the same way, hackers are taking advantage of AI and ML tools for more complex and sophisticated attacks targeting every connected user. This means, almost everyone in a company or organization.
Any user or device is a potential vulnerability breach, phishing and ransomware has affected millions of companies around the world being phishing attacks the most common form of cyber threat causing more than 80% of cyber breaches against businesses. Email and social media were pointed as primary vulnerability breaches in the past year with 43% of apps like photo editors including those that allows to turn a picture to a ‘cartoon’ and 15% business utility apps that offer free of charge features not available in official apps from known platforms.
Nearly 1 billion emails were exposed between 2020 and 2022, affecting 1 in 5 internet users. Only in the United States, 1 in 2 internet users had their accounts breached in 2021 while 1 in 10 US organizations have no insurance against cyber attacks becoming the second highest number of victims per million internet users in 2022.
During COVID-19 pandemic United States experienced an exponential increase in cyber crime that affected nearly 53 million US citizens with phishing and online fraud mostly from email targeted attacks using Federal Aids hooks for individuals and businesses. At the same time, ransomware affected nearly 60% of US organizations with data encrypted attacks costing from $1 million up to $2 millions by the end of 2021.
How to be prepared?
Brooklyn Tech Support has evaluated recent market and customers to overcome security vulnerabilities within infrastructure, network, devices and endpoint users within operations and processes. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. Here we present five considerations to prepare your organization for better response against a cyber event:
Identify possible security gaps
With the increase of cloud adoption, hybrid and remote workers digital footprint and attack surface expands, therefore vulnerabilities also increase. By identifying processes and data flow that expose data to the exterior could help reduce security threat. Analyze every aspect of you data flow and how this data is presented or stored and identify what needs to be remotely accessed or can be easily been take using a external device.
Catalog your assets by level of risk
A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. An asset that is unknown is an asset that can’t be protected. Assure to have a catalog of all your assets, who has it, where is located and how it access your digital environment and data. Bluetooth devices should be counted as they represent one of the weakest security systems.
Prioritize device and user access level
Create groups and segments of devices and users. Give devices and users access to what they need to avoid unauthorized apps being installed or data been accessed by those who don’t know how sensitive this data is. Group policies, Virtual LAN, VPN access, roles based access level are a few techniques that can help to reduce cyber events impact to your organization.
Upgrade from legacy protection to built-in threat intelligence technology
Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning are becoming standard technologies in the same way hackers are using these technologies to target legacy systems without real-time tree process analysis and interval patch updates dependents.
Create a security plan
Every organization needs a security plan that covers proactive and reactive procedures. Provide recurrent training about existing and possible cyber threats, establish a hierarchy chain and procedures about who and how to inform about security breaches or possible cyber events. make sure to have the required tools for your organization to recover from a casualty or cyber event.
At Brooklyn Tech Support we are aware of the existing and future cyber threats. We take a proactive approach, identifying potential issues before they become problems and ensuring consistent system performance as Integrity, Innovation, Adaptability, Reliability and Proactive Support are part of our values. With our next-gen antivirus and threat intelligence solution that consolidate security point products in one unified platform, threat intelligence integration block activities known to be malicious and immediately assesses the origin, impact and severity of threats in the environment and provides recovery guidance for decisive incident response and remediation.
Increase efficiency and better security outcomes from a unified platform solution with machine learning and artificial intelligence for detection of known and zero-day malware, and ransomware that’s easy to manage and scales to organizations of all sizes, from small business to enterprise. We are here to help. Make an appointment for a free antivirus consultation. We can assist you to assess your current and future connectivity needs.