With the threat of cybercrime continuing to grow more prevalent to every businesses operating online, their strategies dedicated to their cybersecurity efforts are directly related to the integrity of their operations. Without these defenses, any business is liable to being ravaged. Since COVID-19’s first wave in the states in 2020, cybercrime, including phishing, ransomware, identity theft and fraud saw a frequency increase of nearly 600%. Which begs the question, is your organization defended well enough to survive an attack?
With such an immense increase, it’s impossible to imagine that any business was able to escape an attack over the course of this past year. While cybersecurity budgets were being allotted for business prior to this influx of crime, attacks have never been so advanced. Effective investments in security, on average, are around $2.4 million dollars for apt defense tools and strategies. What’s staggering is that many organizations report that this isn’t enough as they’ve still seen times that they’ve been compromised. Some businesses that were compromised have had their data incapable of being accessed for longer than a week.
Even the most skilled IT professionals hired by these organizations have admitted to their organization’s faults and weaknesses. The vulnerability they report is often staggering. While these IT professionals are doing everything they can to defend their organizations, sometimes it won’t be enough. The most desired organizations will always face some insane level of cybercrime. Up to 75% of organizations will be compromised by some form of ransomware in the coming year. Throughout 2020, nine in ten organizations reported they were the target of ransomware attacks.
While their investments are important for the overall integrity of the organization, most companies will want to prioritize educating their executives regarding defense strategies specifically related to these attacks. Phishing attempts on executives are dominate in countless industries, so they should always be informed on what these attacks look like and how they can avoid them entirely. Without this defense, some of an organization’s most sensitive data can be put in jeopardy.
What can organizations teach their executives in order to successfully protect them? Most importantly, they’ll first want to evaluate the ways in which an executive could be targeted. Most obviously, these executive’s social profiles will be scoured in order to find their weakness. Even some of the oldest professional networking channels or blog pages will be found and quickly analyzed by the attackers. Any pages including sensitive data should be removed immediately. The less personal information shared on the web, the better. Set any profile to private for the sake of deterring attackers. Also encourage executives to keep a low profile the networks they do use for increased safety.
After these considerations are made, executives will need to be taught the ways in which they might be targeted. They should be aware of what a phishing attack is going to look like, for example. They should never fall victim to a random e-mail that is clearly a phishing attempt. This may require some additional work, as even the least genuine attack will appear as a very sincere message. Executives should be taught to avoid opening any e-mails from contacts they’ve never seen before, or if the contact appears to be impersonating a colleague. When possible, they should also refrain from opening any links included in e-mails from these contacts. Always be sure to file them through the company’s safety tools prior to opening them. Delete e-mails immediately when they’re identified as an attack.
While cybersecurity is a practice that will continue to evolve, executives should always remain informed on how they can help maintain the integrity of their organization. For more information on how to do just that, be sure to take a moment to check out the infographic featured alongside this post. Courtesy of Cancom Global Security.