Top 5 Techniques to Protect Your Business from CYBER EXTORTION
The rise of digitization and technological implementation has invited cybercrimes in all spheres. Any cyber attack on the enterprise or business can pose a significant risk, monetary loss, and damage to reputation. Thus protecting a business from cyber attacks has paramount importance for the enterprise. According to the Cyber Security Ventures’ report, the cybercrime cost will grow by 15 percent over the next five years. It will reach 10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025 from 3 trillion USD in 2015. The rise in cyber extortion within businesses has negative repercussions.
Therefore, to protect your business from cyber extortion, you must implement effective cybersecurity measures. This article is a complete walkthrough on cyber extortion and how to protect your business from cyber extortion. To protect your business, you must adopt particular best practices and robust security measures for your enterprise. The article will discuss them in detail.
What is cyber extortion?
Cyber extortion is a cybercrime type performed on individuals, brands, and enterprises. The attackers focus on disrupting the normal flow or operation of individuals & businesses. They tend to pose damage that causes service disruption, financial drubbing, attackers’ monetary benefit, and reputation damage.
Cyber extortion is a broader category of cybercrime that comprises forcing people to hand over the ransom, stealing sensitive data, tricking victims into accessing secret accounts, or targeting systems for damage. Attackers often use hacking techniques like phishing, ransomware attacks, other malware infections, web application attacks, Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM), persistent attacks, social engineering, etc.
To protect your business from cyber extortion, you must know the most popular attack vectors cybercriminals might use on your enterprise systems.
Common Cyber Extortion Techniques
To protect your business, it is essential to clearly understand the prominent attack vectors & how they help attackers compromise.
· Ransomware:
Ransomware is a malware type that encrypts all victims’ information by infecting the system. It asks the victim to pay a ransom to decrypt those data. Ransomware generally spreads across the network to infect multiple files within the system and target the database. It quickly paralyzes the organization’s daily operations. Data backup and precautions are necessary to protect your enterprise from ransomware attacks.
· Phishing:
Phishing is an online scam that comes under social engineering. In this, attackers use fraudulent attempts to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, financial details, and other personal information. Attackers use social engineering techniques to trick victims into revealing their personal or financial information. They masquerade the victim as a trustworthy organization or individual, such as a bank, government agency, etc. Phishing is possible through fake emails (that look legitimate), text messages, inbox messages, voice calls, etc.
· DDoS attack:
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a severe & non-intrusive cyberattack performed on an organization’s server or system. The attacker takes advantage of the specific capacity limit of a server or network infrastructure. It deters the user from accessing the website or server. The attacker uses tools to generate pseudo traffic through the botnet to block the system from getting genuine user requests. To protect your business from DDoS, you must ensure server-based security measures like load balancers, traffic filters, etc.
· Malware:
Malware (abbreviated as malicious software) is an infectious program designed by cyber criminals to infect the employees of an organization and steal sensitive data or gain access to prohibited accounts. It encompasses multiple harmful programs, such as worms, viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, adware, keyloggers, etc. It can lead to financial losses, data breaches, and other types of damage. To protect your business from cyber extortion, employees must utilize anti-malware & antivirus programs.
· Drive-by compromise:
Drive-by compromise is an attack technique where cybercriminals use malicious programs or links on victims’ computers or mobile devices. To successfully devise this attack, cybercriminals use vulnerabilities in a website or web app to inject malware that gets downloaded as soon as the user clicks the link. Cybercriminals mainly exploit zero-day vulnerabilities or newly discovered ones to deploy drive-by compromise attacks. Wildcard SSL and Web Application Firewalls (WAF) can help prevent enterprises from such threats.
Top Five Ways to Protect Your Business from Cyber Extortion
If you want to protect your business from cyber extortion and carry out a smooth business operation, here are some well-known ways.
1. Data backup is essential:
Backing up all data is an evergreen and best way to safeguard enterprise-grade business information from cyber threats. Most security experts recommend multiple backups of data. Also, it should be isolated from any online threat and easily restorable whenever needed. With the advent of cloud technology, enterprises started storing data in real-time on the cloud. Cloud technology keeps a backup of data dynamically across multiple servers. Hence, it eliminates the trouble of manual backup of data. Data backup helps protect enterprises from ransomware and other malware attacks.
2. Install SSL certificate:
Websites and web applications have become the face of the business. Therefore, establishing a secure transaction is essential for the company & its customers. Thus, security professionals recommend using wildcard SSL certificates. The HTTPS you see on the website uses the SSL certificate. These provide a secure means for transmitting data over the web. Many products and services offer online payment options through their websites. That is another situation where wildcard SSL certificates become necessary. Using SSL, you can protect businesses and users from drive-by compromise attacks.
3. Leverage MFA:
A single password associated with the username isn’t sufficient to protect an account from cyber attacks like brute force, dictionary attacks, credential stuffing, etc. Thus, security professionals recommend using multi-factor authentication (MFA) to protect business accounts with additional factors like OTP, magic links, biometric authentication, etc. If you want to protect your business from cyber extortion, MFA is an efficient choice. Your employees will have to provide OTP or biometric data for verification, in addition to passwords, to protect business accounts from cyber extortion.
4. Robust enterprise-grade monitoring system and awareness:
Another effective way to protect businesses from cyber extortion is to incorporate threat detection, monitoring, and incident response solutions. Security tools like firewalls, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), and Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) can enhance enterprise security and protect your business from cyber extortion. Also, enterprises should educate employees on cyber hygiene & various cyber attacks like phishing, piggybacking, credential stuffing, etc.
5. Have a strong security policy:
A robust cybersecurity policy can help to protect your business from cyber extortion. Policies like HTTPS websites (having wildcard SSL) use only, not sharing account passwords, not repeating passwords on multiple accounts, prohibition from downloading from black-listed sites, etc., are effective ways to protect business compromisation from various cyber extortion.
Conclusion –
This article catered to a crisp idea of the top five pointers you should leverage to protect your business from cyber extortion. This comprehension also highlighted the popular cyber extortion techniques that hackers use. Since websites & web applications are the front faces of a company — integrating wildcard SSL can help secure user requests & server responses.
