Your physical (or virtual) servers hum with activity and your network is throbbing with life. Users constantly log in and out of their machines and your business is as usual. Often times, most users tend to go on with their daily work but the network itself is vulnerable to threats online. If you aren’t careful enough, these threats could hurt your business until it bleeds. Here are five online threats that can just show up and derail your business:
Social Engineering Attacks
While employees casually browse the web, social media is an increasingly favoured pass time for them. By itself, unwarranted browsing on the web on the part of employees is a productivity issue for businesses to address. Added to that, there’s a threat of social engineering attacks that can be potentially dangerous for the business. Victim users are persuaded into clicking links, opening attachments and installing software that could cause security problems for the IT network.
Malware – Trusted or not
An AVG threat report revealed that ‘trusted malware’ is continuing to grow indescribably fast – a whopping 300% increase within a year from 2010 to 2011. While windows OS computers were a primary target earlier, Mac based computers now attract many hackers keen on unleashing havoc on the Mac platform which is increasing in popularity and usage.
DOS (Denial of Service attacks)
Hackers use sophisticated means to disrupt or even disband your IT network by sending out malicious code which is crafted and executed carefully. These aren’t new, but hackers just keep getting better at unleashing it. More commonly known as Distributed Denial of Service attacks, these organized attacks that have already killed IT networks in some major corporations.
This form of an attack usually involves machines attacking other machines using IP addresses through ‘spoofing’ – sending data packets to machines using false sources addresses and thereby bringing down servers which in turn breakdown or refuse to provide service. For businesses, a DDOS attack restricts availability of commercial services.
Identity theft
Individual web users frequently face online fraud and identity theft on the Internet; sometimes, companies and even cities are targeted too. Email spam, website hacks, data theft are all common forms of online fraud and Identity theft that many companies have fallen for. According to a businesswire.com release, the recent Sony Online Entertainment fiasco is a good example where over 24,600,000 data records were breached exposing millions of users to online fraud and ID theft.
Keeping an IT network up and running is a full-time job; network security then, is a responsibility that ought to be taken seriously.
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