Losing access to your personal account usually isn’t a big deal. You either contact support to get you your account back, or you just make a new one.

But, getting locked out of your professional account can harm the brand so much to shut it down.

With businesses both big and small shifting to the digital world, we must talk about the most common cybersecurity threats they might face. 

Let’s dig right into it!

1. Data Breaches 

If we were to talk about cybersecurity issues with the worst consequences, we’d have to mention data breaches. You probably heard it in the context of large corporations like Google, but don’t be fooled – data breaches can happen to a company of any scale. 

Data breach attacks are designed to penetrate your defenses and extract sensitive data. These happen in bulk or as separate cases, but the results are always ugly, especially if we are talking about financial info. 

One way to combat this threat is to invest in an encrypted cloud storage service. Encryption (especially end-to-end) can help you mitigate the data breach damage or, in some cases, even prevent it.

By encrypting your business data, you can prevent a security breach from evolving into a full-blown data breach. Encryption as a concept is quite new, but its potential is limitless. 

2. Phishing

Believe it or not, phishing accounts for about 90% of cybersecurity threats businesses face. Yes, that’s how fast phishing has grown in the past year. This type of security breach relies on the one thing we can’t get a security tool for – human mistake. 

By pretending to be a trusted contact, phishing scammers will ask you for something simple. Most commonly, it’s to click on a link, send account credentials, or download a file. This, of course, leads to loss of account control, or worse. 

The problem with phishing lies in the social element. Scammers are getting more convincing, and phishing schemes are evolving hand-in-hand with the internet. The best course of action is to triple-check suspicious emails and never send sensitive data through regular channels.

3. Ransomware

As the name suggests, ransomware is about money. A scammer will get you to click on a link or download a file that will encrypt the data on your computer, or even worse – the whole server. They will ask you for ransom money in exchange for a key to unlock your data. Once you reach this point, it’s too late for prevention, and the only way to retrieve your data is to pay up. 

The problem lies in the fact that ransomware, even though it’s not that sophisticated, can set your business back quite a lot. It can also spread to other devices quickly and lock you out of your data. 

Besides standard security practices, the best preparation for a ransomware attack is to plan and make backups of important data often. If you have a backup available, you can tell the data kidnapper that you will pay no ransom and that you don’t care about their demands.

4. DDoS and Botnets

A distributed denial-of-service attack (aka DDoS) is a way to disrupt or completely inhibit communication by overloading the network. Hackers will use botnets and all sorts of IoT devices to flood your network, temporarily interrupting any communication or data traffic with your clients.

The DDoS attack is the least dangerous cybersecurity threat on our list. However, it can still cause lots of damage and lead to unhappy website visitors. Connectivity issues during high-traffic periods are not something you want to experience. 

It would be wise to get some sort of network monitoring to track sudden changes in traffic. An experienced network security specialist can recognize DDoS attacks early on and act on time! 

5. Human Error 

Lastly, we must mention the main culprit of cybersecurity issues – human mistakes. 

Cybersecurity is complicated. Most people don’t go beyond OS updates when it comes to security maintenance. This trend is changing, but not faster than malware is evolving. 

So, the best practice would be to at least try and get everyone on board. Whenever you are implementing something new into your business’s digital workspace, make sure everyone is familiar with the changes. Educating your colleagues about hot cybersecurity practices will save you a lot of money and time down the line. You don’t have to get deep into it, but internet security awareness training won’t hurt.

Conclusion 

Hiring a team of IT security specialists is something not many companies can afford. That’s why it’s important that everyone has at least an idea of how to protect their business accounts and their data. 

Hopefully, this article helped you get a grasp on what lurks around the internet and what you can do to prevent the biggest threats. 

Stay safe!