Cybercriminals eye passwords, cloud vulnerabilities

The cybercriminal is relentless, often sophisticated, and extremely persistent, warns ESET South Africa chief executive Carey van Vlaanderen. She says in a constantly evolving threat landscape in which cloud adoption continues to grow and passwords are highly coveted by nefarious actors, attacks are expected to increase sharply in 2023.

The up-side is that this is being met with incredible advancement and innovation from the cybersecurity industry, according to Van Vlaanderen. In its Digital Defense report released last year, Microsoft found a 74% increase in password attacks, resulting in approximately 921 attacks per second.

“Passwords remain an easy win for threat actors but that is often down to users lending this attack vector to them on a plate. Attackers are cleverly compromising business networks prior to their phishing campaigns in order to look authentic and even when victims believe they are carrying out their due diligence on a site, they can still be duped into believing they are in communication with the real deal,” Van Vlaanderen explains.

While nearly 1 000 attacks per second is an astonishing amount, there is much more people and businesses can do to reduce this number.

Van Vlaanderen says, “Passwords continue to be something of an inconvenience in people’s lives, which is often down to not knowing or even trusting the free security layers on offer.

“Implementing password managers on personal and work devices can help force unique and strong passwords for all accounts applicable. Most importantly, introducing two-factor authentication on every account will help reduce the impact of phishing campaigns hugely.”

The past year has seen a tremendous increase in businesses and consumers embracing cloud and in 2023 this space will yet again be the target of cybercriminals. Van Vlaanderen says the seismic shift from traditional on-prem to cloud hosting applications and infrastructure elevates cybersecurity risk.

While cloud services offer incredible benefits, it’s imperative that from a risk mitigation perspective, to assign thought and attention to:

• using a reputable cloud service provider – a fundamental first step to beating cybercriminals;
• optimising and configuration using best practices;
• making use of best-of-breed cybersecurity software;
• multi-factor authentication (which should be standard);
• encryption (which should be employed wherever possible);
• strong password policies;
• assigning credentials and rights only to those that require access;
• redundancy is essential, backup and a disaster recovery plan should be enforced;
• and test for vulnerabilities timeously.

In 2022, spoof emails and ransomware defined the year and it looks set to remain a leading concern for people, businesses, and cybersecurity teams in 2023.

“The damage caused by emails sent by cybercriminals that convincingly look like they originate from people within an organisation is real and extensive. These types of fraud usually try to create a sense of urgency or employ scare tactics to coerce the victim into complying with the attacker’s requests.

“Emails with requests for quick payment should be handled with caution using as emails can be spoofed with legitimate invoices but with cybercriminal banking details,” says Van Vlaanderen.

Despite ransomware reaching record levels this year, many organisations still do not understand where their most valuable data and systems lie, and therefore have inadequate data and protection.

“A good place to start then is to build an understanding of exactly all the data points that exists in your business, enabling a clear strategy to be formulated on the data that is collected and stored.

“Irrespective of the size of your organisation, data protection is a must and can be in the form of staff training, following compliance guidelines, utilising appropriate software, as well as ensuring data storage is secure and backed up, and that there is a data or disaster recovery strategy in place.”

Van Vlaanderen predicts the continued innovation and adoption of smart technologies, IOT devices, car connectivity and infotainment, will also present new attack vectors for cybercriminals in 2023.

“Given the reality of attacks becoming more sophisticated and personalised, people and organisations can’t afford to be without some form of a protective solution in place, regardless of where the infrastructure is located or what device it is on.”

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