Cybersecurity is fast becoming a significant risk factor for individuals and organizations alike so you need to know how to prevent malware attacks. Pretty much anyone who uses the Internet is vulnerable to attacks. This is because hackers constantly work to develop innovative and advanced cybersecurity tricks that will be difficult to track and prevent. A lot of these techniques target popular email platforms, third-party apps, mobile devices, and even cloud storage infrastructure. It’s a real problem and according to the Check Point report, malware and other cyber-attacks have increased by up to 50% in 2019 alone
For instance, banking malware and other types of destructive malware are among the most common threats. In addition, hackers can use banking malware to steal banking credentials, funds and payment from someone’s bank account. The worst part is that most of this malware is already out there.
What Can Malware Do?
Destructive malware can disable system functions and limit data access. It’s one of the most common online threats around. It affects businesses across all types of industries. Through this malware, cybercriminals can pretty much disable millions of machines and wipe away a considerable amount of data.
These attacks focus on doing more than just steal or spy on data. It’s all about incapacitating the victim and it can cause major damage to the affected individuals or organizations. The interesting thing is that advanced nation-state actors have started most of these attacks. But they’re now becoming increasingly prevalent among regular cybercriminals.
According to reports, if an organization is unlucky enough to suffer one of these attacks they could easily lose as much as $239 million just to fix the problem. This is without considering the loss and destruction of thousands of devices. In addition, just to recover from such an attack requires about 512 hours of constant work using solutions applied by qualified incident report teams. This translates to lost revenue and time. But it’s necessary to ensuring that the destroyed environments are rebuilt and remediated properly.
Most Destructive Malware
Some of the most common destructive malware include Stuxnet, NotPetya and Industroyer. The manufacturing industry makes up 50% of the worst destructive malware cases. The oil and gas as well as the education sectors are also common targets of some of the worst cyberattacks using cutting-edge malware. According to IBM X-Force, a lot of these attacks have their origin from the Middle East, Europe, and the US.
How to Reduce the Risk
The good news is there is a way to prevent malware attacks. For instance, Cybercriminals often use tactics like water-hole attacks, third-party connection, password guessing, and phishing emails to infiltrate organizations and businesses. Cybercriminals also target privilege accounts specifically, using them to navigate certain lucrative networks.
The following steps can be very helpful in helping organizations prevent malware attacks.
1. Check how your response plan performs under pressure. You can do this through a well-tailored tabletop exercise paired with a cyber range to see how ready your company is for strategic and tactical malware attacks.
2. Use threat intelligence to help you comprehend the gravity of the threat to your organization as a whole. In addition, keep in mind that every cybercriminal has a different end goal and skill set. Threat intelligence allows you to leverage this information to improve your organization’s response efficacy.
3. Employ in-depth and effective defense by applying multiple security controls. These should all be a part of a comprehensive Cyberattack Preparation and Execution Framework.
4. Next, apply Multifactor Authentication (MFA) all through your environment. There’s no getting around the MFA’s cost-benefit factor especially when you consider the benefit it offers to help prevent malware attacks by reducing the amount of guessed or stolen passwords.
5. It’s also important to back up all your stuff especially offline, and to also test your backups. You should store your backups somewhere else aside from your primary network. This secondary storage destination should allow read access only.
6. Another important step to prevent malware attacks is to develop an action plan to enable quick response to attack to help you restore business functionality. Generally, companies that apply measures to prevent malware attacks while having an action plan to respond to them perform better than unprepared organizations.
7. The last step to prevent malware attacks involves developing an internal network baseline which you can use to keep track of any changes that show lateral movement as this could be tipping you off to malicious activity.
The very last step would be to give Defencebyte software a chance to help you with your business security from all possible attacks. We recommend it as one of the best program in the market so you definitely should give it a try!
Let us know in the comments down below if any of these tips helped you prevent malware attacks from attacking your systems.
