THE MOST COMMON CYBER THREATS THAT CAN AFFECT YOU (AND BIG COMPANIES, TOO)
Basic types of Cyber Security attacks are quickly becoming a part of our everyday language. Do you know what they are and what these words and terms mean? Most people don’t, until one of these monsters taps into your bank account or sends your Instagram feed haywire. Here’s a little primer with some fun examples.
- Phishing – This is when someone online impersonates a business to trick you into giving up personal information. This is currently the big one, along with her evil sister Spear Phishing, which we will cover next. Why? Because 30% of online phishing messages are opened and 12% of those users clink on the bad link or attachment. That’s all it takes. Phishing comes in many forms – websites, social media attacks, phone calls, and charity phishing.
- Spear-phishing – This little jewel should be renamed Yahoo!-ing because it compromised 1 billion accounts, cost shareholders $1 billion and lopped $350 million off its sale price to Verizon. It also cost CEO Marissa Mayer $10 million in bonus money. Spear-phishing is simply the practice of sending fraudulent emails from a known, trusted sender to induce targets to reveal confidential information. If you’ve clicked on one of these, join the club. 97% of the world’s population can’t identify a solid phishing email. In fact, 91% of all cyber-attacks are initiated by a spear-phishing email.
- Malware – This is short for malicious software and it’s designed to infect computers and inflict harm in different ways. The main examples are below:
- Viruses – No need to explain – we’ve all been there.
- Trojans – This is a bad piece of software that looks legitimate. When downloaded, it provides imposters with access to your system and the personal information therein.
- Ransomware – This is a type of software designed to steal or block access to a computer system until the victim comes up with some cash (usually Bitcoin). The FBI’s standard response to this is, “Pay the ransom.” Ransomware gets in the news when somebody steals Orange Is The New Black or Pirates of The Caribbean 12, but the average ransom demand is under $1,000 and 57% of attacks target individual consumers.
- Spyware – This software sits on your system and gathers private information, including all of your passwords.
- Worms – These guys replicate themselves on a computer network, causing widespread damage.
- Network Probe – The target of this type of attack is a company or network and occurs where a probe tries to access a system by looking for its weak points. Foreign governments use this on media outlets.
- Brute-force Cracking – This is a sophisticated “pile on” effort where application programs basically try to guess passwords over and over until they get them right. It sounds weird, but it can be effective, as both LinkedIn and WordPress found out the hard way last year.
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) – This type of attack is simply an attempt to overwhelm on online service with traffic until it is unavailable. This type of attack took down Donald Trump’s site last year.
- Advanced Persistent Threat (ATP) – This type of attack is in the James Bond mode. It’s where someone gains unauthorized access to a network with the goal of covertly staying there to gather more and more sensitive information over time. Remember the Sony Pictures hack that released a bunch of emails, including the studio saying terrible things about Angelina Jolie? That was an ATP attack.Isn’t technological advancement fun!