We all living in digital world, and we also know cyber attacks exists to harm digital life of individuals and organizations. What we actually need to protect our digital assets, sensitive information, computers from these cyber attacks. We need to have skills, knowledge and behavior to safe our digital life. The cyber attacks can spoil our lives in no time with fake news, scams or some malicious activity. How can we protect ourselves? We need to know today before it gets late.
As technology is evolving today, cyber attacks also getting fast day by day. It involves a number of techniques to attack some individual or organization. We discuss these techniques one by one, so that you can get the things easily: - The first tactic is phishing in which hacker send victim fake email or fraudulent calls or messages to trap victim to click on malicious link or do intended tasks that actually attacker wants. When you click on malicious link, hacker takes to some malicious links or some official looking form to fill sensitive information. Actually, in phishing attack, hacker creates some kind of urgency to manipulate victim to do his desired tasks.
- The second tactic used by hackers is malware, hackers creates malicious softwares that damages your systems. They can spy you, can control your system without your permission. They can create, and access data in your system and damage it.
- The third tactic that hackers use against organizations to steal their data, and demand ransome or money to return their data. If organizations do not pay money to them, they sell their data to dark web or leaks to any of officail social media. It demages the reputation of organizations and trust of users on them.
- Social engineering is one of the mostly used to take advantage of human vulnerabilities, actually hackers manipulate users to reveal their sensitive information like passwords, credit cards details or other information. We all like to help others but this kind of behavior is exploited by hackers.
- Insider threats are executed by the persons actually working inside the organization. Why they do that, to harm the organization. This attack is generated by trusted persons of organization. They leak the sensitive information to harm the organization.
- Distributed Danial of Service(DoS/DDoS) attack makes the systems inactive to flooding the a number of requtest, that system can not handle it. When all the requests are flooded by one system it is known as DoS while when a number of system involves to make service unavaible, it is called DDoS. When requests cross the limit, the system hangs and stop working.
Now we just need to learn how to handle and responds to that kind of cyber threats. In today's era, protective measures are necessary because you are not threat to physical person than to a digital person. Digital Security awareness is not just important for organizations, it is also important for individual also. You need to not to reveal your digital assets information to others on any cost. Protect your bank account information, passwords, health records and personal communication, it will prevent identity theft or financial loss. For organizations, this kind of lack of information leads to major data breaches , regulatory penalties and reputation damage. Here are digital security best practices: - 2-Factor Authentication: Add 2 factor authentication to all of your accounts with your phone number or another email account you make your account protected. - Strong Passwords: Keeping your passwords strong and unique make your account safe. - Keeping Software updated: Everyday, there is a new vulnerability. This results and software update with vulnerability patch. - Recognizing Phishing attempts: Looking into malicious links and email that can urge to reveal your sensitive information. - Practicing safe online behavior: Do not post necessary personal data, that can harm you. Hacker can track you through your digital social media accounts.
Having security awareness, can make to protective and first line of defense to cyber attacks. Verifying email sender before clicking on the links attached to email and making your device locked can reduce risks to your digital life. For organizations, it is necessary to provide training to their employees to prevent from data breaches. Studies shows that 90% of breaches occur due to the human error. This training includes password management, awareness about phishing, incident reporting and guidelines for using company devices securely. The training should be engagning and long term not just one time, it should includes real world simulation help to handle situation. Their are many resources that help to provide awareness. These resources help individuals and organizations to adopt online safe policies and trained their employees to be proactive to latest evolving cyber threats. Privates companies also provide these kind of awareness training to the employees. Each month a number of themes and highlights are shared to guide you to be secure online. The digital security is not just a technical defense, it is habit, behavior and right mind set to protect themselves and organizations. In current era, a single careless click can become a massive breach and a reputation damage for companies. We can only protect them through just awareness and education because it is the most powerful defense against cyber attacks.