Hackers are on a Holiday Spree
While many of us feel festive during the holidays, malicious hackers are getting ready to carry out hacking sprees. To stay ahead of savvy hackers, you have to understand how they think. As you create your cybersecurity strategy, think about what a cyber criminal might do to take advantage of the holidays—here are some ideas…
You Might Receive an Offer for a Fake Job
Using deceitful means to get employees to download harmful files is a classic method for gaining access to a company’s network, and it falls under the category of “social engineering” schemes; these strategies rely on people’s good nature and faith to deceive them – a rather harsh kind of trickery.
As reported by U.S. News & World Report in an article published in October 2022, one infamous hacking ring was able to enter a cryptocurrency platform and came away with thievery worth more than 600 million dollars. How did they get in? By fooling an unsuspecting engineer with a phony job offering that made him download a corrupted PDF file. The aftermath is now history.
Perform Remote Scans to Uncover Insecurities
The story provided may give some small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) a false sense of security. You might think, “Since we don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars like cryptocurrency platforms, why would hackers attack us?” However, that’s not the case.
By 2022, perpetrators of cybercrime will have the ability to nonspecifically analyze billions of IPs simply. What are they seeking? Flaws that allow them simple admittance to systems, comparable to an “unlocked front door.” Identical to other wrongdoers, hackers take full advantage of effortless chances for perpetrating their criminal acts—the character or size of the goal is secondary. To draw a comparison, you don’t need to be a massive, renowned company in order to become a subject of cybercrime; all you have to do is fail to secure your front door and you can become a target.
Credentials are for Sale on the Dark Web
Do you know that some hackers take a shortcut and actually PURCHASE access to their upcoming victims’ networks? This is 100% true. This year, Uber was assaulted by malicious actors who obtained a login credential from the dark web. Once inside, they were able to take data from one of Uber’s budgetary resources.
It is thought that hackers harvested the credentials from a contractor’s infected device. So if cybercriminals are looking for an easy way into a set of networks, they might just look in the marketplace for stolen passwords. That is why multi-factor authentication is so important to foil any hacker’s attempt at logging in!
Wi-Fi Networks are Impersonated with Drones
Even the most skilled hackers may become bored with cyberattacks that rely on buying credentials on the dark web, so they might try something like replicating a recent attack in the U.S. which even involved drones! This just goes to show how creative these hackers can be.
In this attack, the perpetrators made use of two drones to place devices on the rooftop of the company’s building. The purpose of these devices was to deceive people into thinking that they were connecting to the company’s actual Wi-Fi network, therefore resulting in unsuspecting employees logging in.
After obtaining an employee’s credentials, the hackers started breaching the company’s network. Thankfully, the organization was aware of their presence due to continuous monitoring of unusual user activity, which could have been a bigger issue if not for this detection system.
You can read more about this at TechFunnel.
Heard of Password Spraying?
To gain access many hackers attempt a brute force attack by entering numerous passwords to one username until they are unavoidably denied from the system. If a person is repeatedly locked out, they may become frustrated and resort to password spraying, another common type of attack.
A password spraying attack consists of threat actors attempting to use the same password on a list of user accounts. 3.5 million Americans use passwords like “123456”, which are known as either default passwords or commonly used passwords. You can read more about this on Aura’s website. Password spraying takes advantage of people who don’t change their default passwords or use weak ones that can be easily guessed, meaning that good password management is essential.
Curious About Your Company's Security Report Card?
As a Managed Service Provider (MSP) and Managed Service Security Provider (MSSP) Intech Hawaii offers a range of preventive and responsive security solutions that help small businesses defend against even the most sophisticated threat actors. From employee awareness training and ongoing layers of threat monitoring, all the way through incident response and remediation, Intech Hawaii’s team of IT industry professionals and array of Armor services in IT, Cybersecurity and Compliance has your business needs covered.
