Know your enemy: understanding cyber risks to face cyber attacks
How much do you worry about cyber security? Are you aware of how many cyber risks might affect your company? Do you know how to prevent or face cyber attacks?
These questions aren’t asked for the purpose of scaring you, of course. Instead, the point is to meditate on such delicate topics and find answers that might be extremely useful to check the actual status of IT security measures and care within your organization.
In his masterpiece The Art of War, Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu would say that is key to know your enemy to succeed in battle. This metaphor fits very well with the cyber security matter. In fact, statistics and data deduced from Trend Micro 2023 Midyear Cybersecurity Threat Report clearly show that potential cyber risks keep evolving and the potential dangerousness of cyber threats and attacks increases aiming to break through defenses and generate the most severe damage possible. In short, this is war.
Let’s take a look at the most relevant and impressing information from this report concerning the cyber security landscape within the first half of 2023:
- more than 85 billion threats were detected;
- 37 billion emails, 1 billion URLs and 46 billion files were labeled as malicious;
- 14 new ransomware families were created;
- more than 90k ransomware endpoint were detected;
- 62% increase of attacks to Linux operating systems, more than any other else.
These stats outline a metaphorical battlefield where cyber criminals continue to master IT technologies, by now even artificial intelligence, in order to create ever more damaging attacks – just like sophisticated weapons. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023 highlights that this kind of attack can cause damages for around $4.5 million, which means +15% over the last three years.
Prevention for cyber attacks: is that enough?
In the actual cyber security scenario, one question comes clear: nowadays, is prevention still enough to prevent cyber attacks? The answer is uncertain. Let’s find out why.
In a way, clearly prevention is still essential to mitigate cyber risks, facing a wide range of potential threats and reducing the likelihood and negative impact of cyber attacks. Indeed, setting specific preventive measures, like softwares and systems regular updates, network security methods, strong authenticated access, data encryption and professional education and training, not only safeguards data management and digital assets, but also minimizes the consequences of security breaches in terms of finance, reputation and activity. One of the most effective preventive tools within companies is the incident response plan, a defensive security framework that empowers individuals and organizations to stay one step ahead of cyber criminals and be more resilient when cyber attacks occur.
On the other hand, though, even if all of this is correct in theory, in practice nowadays can’t be enough to guarantee victory in this war against cyber crime. Why? Because of two complementary reasons:
- prevention expects important costs to bear, Statista states that companies worldwide allocate at least 12% of their IT budget to cyber security;
- prevention is not always a flawless investment, as even the most secure defensive strategies and techniques might be bypassed by hackers with the right expertise to make ever more dangerous and malicious attacks.
A new ally to tackle cyber attacks: check out Namirial CyberExpert
So, what’s the best way to enforce prevention and keep an organization even safer from malwares and computer viruses? The right solution is Namirial CyberExpert.
This is the innovative cyber security platform for companies and professionals, which can be activated securely thanks to public digital identity system. CyberExpert, which exclusively operates from the outside with no need to install any software, is able to scan the cyber threats to which your organization is more likely exposed to and correctly assesses the actual risks and activates proper and effective security measures. This analysis allows to measure the real effectiveness of security systems in use, highlight their gaps and ultimately set the priority cyber security investments to be done. Namirial CyberExpert fully complies with GDPR and enables users to:
- discover and fix cyber threats related to malware infections;
- find out leaked credentials (data breach);
- identify data breaches through deep web analytics;
- check malicious and copyright-infringing data transfers over peer-to-peer networks.
The platform is based on external cyber intelligence techniques through the use of a risk engine and provides an analysis of IT infrastructure weaknesses, data breaches, malware and deep web. This in-depth vulnerability analysis aims to detect the “known” weak points of the IT infrastructures over the exposed network perimeter allowing users to reduce the risk originated from cyber attacks quickly and promptly, before cyber attackers exploit the vulnerabilities. At the end of the test, it generates a detailed report including the list of all the critical issues identified with the relevant risk class and the best practices to follow to fix them.
Namirial CyberExpert is a simple, easy and intuitive tool: check out the platform here.
Namirial CyberExpert: cyber security made easy and trusted for all
“Today there’s a strong focus on security by large companies, while entrepreneurs and professionals still don’t have full sensitivity on this topic, and tend to underestimate the risks. In a context like the current one, where everything is exposed on the network, even a production machine, having details on email addresses which could be targeted by data breaches, vulnerabilities and malware communications becomes key. CyberExpert platform carries out assessments to return a complete report with remediation suggestions and initiatives without the installation of any softwares or local agents” (Luigi-Enrico Tomasini, Namirial’s Vertical Software Product Director).
Namirial CyberExpert is an innovative and unique platform because it is:
- testable for free offering everyone the opportunity to do a first free analysis of their company’s IT vulnerabilities;
- immediately available online, with no need to install any software;
- accessible and secure for everyone, especially small-medium sized enterprises and professionals, who can safely safeguard their data and work from external threats with a minimum investment;
- simple to use as, to launch an analysis, it is only needed to enter a few data easily retrievable even by people with basic IT skills (public IP address, email, domain, web address);
- transparent and reliable, as the analysis provides complete and easy-to-understand reports highlighting all the critical issues detected by cyber intelligence techniques and the actions to be taken to correct them, thus allowing companies to better plan further investments in cyber security.
