Cyber Security Intelligence: Threats Businesses Face Today

The evolution of the threat landscape in terms of cyber security has proved the lack of deterrence on the part of threat actors around the world. If anything, it shows how determined such people are to compromise private information for personal gains.

They take little time to adapt, switching tactics and picking out different choices of attack vectors, prompting the need for those with data at risk to stay ahead and apply cyber security intelligence. In this article, we will discuss some of the latest risks and vulnerabilities attackers will take advantage of if left unattended.

One of the biggest risks lies in patches: attackers will easily overcome unfinished and hurried patches. System administrators often find themselves in a problematic situation when they have to make sure each patch is not only being deployed on time, but is also of the best possible quality.

On the one hand, if a patch is left with flaws or is incomplete, it can expose sensitive data and lead to a disruption of the entire system. On the other hand, delaying its implementation can leave the system exposed to threats.

The most common targets, in such cases, are banking systems, especially since they offer open banking and ATMs. Online payment systems are likely to come in the crosshairs and are vulnerable to malware, which is why authorities need to keep a check on faults in application programming interfaces (APIs) as well as new phishing schemes.

In the past year, there has been an increase in the sale of ATM malware, and many of these ‘malware families’ were found competing with each other in terms of features and price range for market dominance, where they will try to outdo each other in terms of malware features and price.

Deep Fakes are also gaining prominence amongst attackers due to their ability to deceive viewers or listeners. Their use is slowly, but surely, moving from creating false celebrity pornographic videos to exploiting enterprises and manipulating their procedures. One of the biggest examples reported by a cyber security firma was the defrauding of an energy firm of nearly US$250,000 through a false, AI-generated voice of the company’s CEO.

The use of this technology marks a shift in cybercriminals’ practices from conventional business email compromise (BEC), proving an effective addition to their arsenal. The C-suite is likely to be a frequent target via this type of fraud due to their presence in calls, meetings, videos, and various appearances.

Attackers have also been benefiting from ‘wormable’ faults and deserialization errors. Vulnerable systems are being compromised using common protocols such as SMB (Server Message Block) and RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). Flaws and deficiencies entailing the deserialization of unsafe information has also turned into a major concern, even more so in the case of enterprise application security.

Risks that take advantage of this sort of weakness are able to change information that seems safe from modification and permits the possible implementation of attacker-controlled code. Instead of looking for and compiling numerous deficiencies together to implement malicious code, cybercriminals have started exploiting deserialization related vulnerabilities in order to assume control of systems more easily, regardless of the complexity of the environment.

Attacks throughout this year seemed to have been planned and coordinated more carefully. This is a bigger threat than it should be because of the scarcity of cybersecurity skills and insufficient security implementation.

However, companies can lessen the impact of such advanced threats, such as persistent malware, phishing attacks, and zero-day attacks with the help of cyber security intelligence and insights for extra protection.

That is because actionable cybersecurity intelligence combined with techniques used in enhancing security and risk management can allow organizations to defend their systems diligently by uncovering security gaps, removing vulnerable links, and comprehending attacker strategies.

At present, Security Operations Center or SOC analysts can show the bigger picture of an organization’s infrastructure to its decision-makers and IT professionals. Such professionals are trained to correlate their assessments with global risk intelligence.

This results in the hired cyber security firma enabling the company to gain a better perspective exceeding the endpoint, covering multiple infrastructural components like email, server, cloud workloads, and networks.

In this ever-evolving landscape, organizations need a multilayered defense comprising a cross-generational combination of various security mechanisms based on the situation.