Future Threats in Cyber Security

Cyber-attacks aim at confusing the business by interrupting the operations as well as increasing fear to the users. Once the attackers gain access to the company security systems, they access the database and manipulate to suit their motives. For instance, attackers can change some accounts in the organization and siphon some payment made to the vendors by organizations to their bank accounts (Gupta et al., 2016). Hackers may invade the system with the aim of destroying the company reputation and so that the victim company will lose customers and attack become the immediate beneficially of the lost clients. Also, hackers will get the users credentials, credits cards, social security numbers and use them to commit economic crimes and frauds elsewhere.

The business world is existing in many uncertainties as far as the security of the system, networks, and programs are concerned. Many organizations have good reasons to worry about exiting and pending cyber threats (Gupta et al., 2016). Cyber threats are the possibility of a malicious attempt to destroy or disrupt the computer network or computer network system. Due to lack of enough security measures as well as risk mitigation measures, hackers can hack into the system (Gupta et al., 2016). Some of the common cyber threats include distributed denial of the services, the hacking and malware attack. In the future, the risks of cybersecurity will be crypto jacking, worse as well as supply chain compromise. Hackers have become more knowledgeable, and they are aware of the types of vulnerabilities existing in the organization, it is, therefore, essential for business managers to keep the security professionals on the task to manage the threats (Gupta et al., 2016). There three key cybersecurity concerns that business owners face as discussed here below:

Unprecedented cyber-attacks- the increased adoption and application of the computer information systems and other technologies have led to an exponential increase in the amount of information or rather data generated by the business. As the number of devices carrying and storing confidential data increases, so are the opportunities for hackers to attack systems or instead computer network (Gupta et al., 2016). The emergence of the internet of things has created unprecedented attacks, and surface security professionals have to deal with in current as well as the future business environment. Therefore organization IT managers must have such information in the mind when developing cybersecurity strategies. The strategies should be beyond computers, mobile devices but rather incorporate other gadgets that have internet connectivity abilities.

Cyber espionage- organizations whether small, Mid-sized firms or large corporations have resulted in storing some of the data in cloud technology. The cloud technology increased to be adopted by the most organization as per the research was done by right scale group indicates that private cloud continues to be taken at a rate of 77% in organizations (Gupta et al., 2016). It does not matter whether a private company has adopted cloud technology since attack whether from inside or outside of the organization, when hybrid cloud technologies are attacked, the intellectual properties, trade secret, as well as other valuable assets, will be compromised or be stolen. Besides, the customer data will be attacked and compromised, and clients will drag the organizations to a court battle. Data managers need to be aware of the cloud technologies best practices as well as regulations involving sensitive data. As such managers should set the cloud technology more securely as well as doing regular monitoring (Ekstedt et al., 2015).

Data theft- various researches conducted has shown that small and medium organizations are not only targets to cybercrimes but also the principal targets. Majority of the attacks which were a success and attempted attacks in the last two years were on small and medium enterprises. Cybercriminals target this business as gateways to larger organizations (Ekstedt et al., 2015). In most cases, the organizations attacked do not have well defined and robust protocols to protect any form of theft. Small and medium organizations save similar threats as large corporations but the recent face threats with fewer resources and expertise compared to the large corporation hence attack small business can be fatal (Ekstedt et al., 2015). However, in the new era of cyber-attacks, vulnerabilities face both small and large business organizations. The organization should work on understating hacker’s methods since it could help imminent threats of having data stolen. It is critical for a business to stay ahead of the game when it comes to cybersecurity as doing so will protect and prevent a large-scale attack on the system.

As discussed earlier on, cyber-attack is all the offensive action that targets a computer network, personal computing devices such as laptops, and others, as well as attacking computer information systems (Ekstedt et al., 2015). These attacks are aimed to steal, manipulate data, destroy crucial information as well as interrupt the entire organization operations. Some of the typical cyber threats that are most prevalent in the market include denial of service attacks (DoS), hacking threat and malware threats.

Denial of services- this is the most technical type of cyber threat as it overwhelms a system’s resources to the point that the computer will not be able to respond to service request from the users (Knowles et al., 2015). The denial of services attack is mainly on the system resources. However, the offense is initiated from many numbers of machines that have been infected with malicious codes or programs and controlled by attackers either from internal of the organization or external. Denial of services attack unlike other attacks, it does not provide direct benefits to the attacker. Some attackers who execute this form of assaults are satisfied by playing the organization operations, but in a case where the attacker is a competitor in the market, then he or she would have achieved real benefits since customers would shift or rather look for services from attacker’s firm (Knowles et al., 2015). An attacker can execute the denial of services offline with the aim of launching other parallel attacks such as session hijacking.

Malware threats. From a definition point of view, malware is a type of software designed to operate in a compromised computer system without the user noticing (Knowles et al., 2015). Some examples of malware include the ransomware, the command, and control as well as spyware and virus among others. Cybercriminals deploy malware in the systems such that they can monitor all operations taking place in the company and eventually get a gateway to obtain the attack. Malware is used to the computer system by attackers with different objectives, some of the goals include information exfiltration, operations disruptions, and demand payment (Knowles et al., 2015).

Some of the key objectives or aim of cyber-attack is to steal or even compromise data. However, there has been a growing number breaking into the organization's network with a different purpose altogether. The current hackers are more likely interested in corporate computing power as opposed to the information asset. In other words, they are hijacking the network infrastructure to mine the cryptocurrencies. Crypto jacking will be the next big cyber-threats to organizations across the globe (Kruse et al., 2017).

Crypto-jacking- crypto-jacking is the next significant cyber threat since hackers are co-opting the computers with the mining malware to get substantial economic benefits through fraudulent means. Hackers are executing these forms of attacks to mine cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin (Kruse et al., 2017). If hackers managed to hack at least one thousand computers, they could gain about $200000 per annum. Malware used to mine crypto-currencies can run for months or even years without system users noticing, this is unlike many cases of other forms of attack such as ransomware and malware which are seen earlier and reported (Kruse et al., 2017). It is said that, over the last one year, Darktrace have detected and prevented over one thousand crypto-currency mining incidents. For there was an incident of bitcoin mining under the hood where illegal bitcoin mining occurred, and victim firm did not notice as the standard virus monitoring tools and other threats had not identified the malware (Kruse et al., 2017). The incident was discovered after the company deployed artificial intelligence-based on defense technology.

Supply chain cyber-threats. This is a form of cyber threat whose objective is to destroy the organization by targeting the less secure components in the whole organization’s supply network. It is important to note that a supply chain attack can take place in any of the industry ranging from the financial sector, government sector as well as oil industry (?Cornell et al., 2018). How does this happen? A supply chain attack occurs where the cybercriminals typically interfere with the product’s manufacturing process by installing rootkit as well as hardware-based spying components.

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