What is a Cyber Threat?

What is a Cyber Threat?

Here we will understand the term what is the cyber threat. The term "cyber" and "threat" work in combination - where "cyber" means something related to computer and digital systems, and "threat" means to cause damage or something that can bring danger.

Cyber threat is the practice performed by cyber criminals or black hat hackers intending to harm a system, disrupt any computer system, or steal data for monetary benefit. Some well-known categories of cyber threats are injection attacks, man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, social engineering, physical attacks, malware-based attacks, privilege escalation, and more. To solve a cyber attack, security professionals must understand what is a cyber threat and in what form or from what sources could they appear.

Anyone with malicious intentions, such as terrorist groups, black-hat hacker groups, corporate spies, hacktivists, hostile nation-states, disgruntled employees, criminal-minded organizations, etc., can cause a cyber threat. Different cyber threat techniques that cybercriminals enact are:- information gathering, initial access, command & control (C&C), persistence, defense evasion, lateral movement, credential access, exfiltration, privilege escalation, etc.

Where Do Cyber Threats Come From?

Since we have gathered a clear understanding of what is a cyber threat, let us dig deep into the various sources that are responsible for planning a cyber threat or making it happen. Below we have discussed the major sources of cyber threats.

Hostile Nation-States

They are aggressive nation-state actors and hackers with the "License to Hack Systems." They work for the nation and government and often work as a part of the semi-hidden cyber army. These cyber threat actors have various tools and technologies to initiate cyber against an organization or individual.

Terrorist Groups

Terrorists, as we all know, are individuals or groups of people who commit acts of violence with particular political interests in mind. Modern-day terrorists prefer cyber attacks over physical attacks. They will target government agencies, organizations, and factories to steal sensitive data, leak confidential details, or harm a targeted organization or individual.

Corporate Spies and Organized Crime Organizations

Often companies hire hackers and technical experts who work as spies to exploit their employees or steal information from rival companies. They can deploy various cyber attacks to pose a threat to an individual or an organization. Even organized crimes prepared by specific organizations or hacker groups can initiate cyber threats. They come under mid-level threat, and their goals are profit-driven. They often use spyware (malicious programs that spy on the victims’ systems) for cyber espionage.

Hacktivists

The term is a fusion of "Hacking" and "Activism." These activists group are responsible for triggering cyber threats with a motive to harm others socially or politically. They mainly perform the leaking of an organization's data or defacing business websites. They also come under medium-level threat. Their goals are propaganda-driven and to cause damage to achieve fame for the cause.

Disgruntled Insiders

Disgruntled employees are individual employees who feel overworked, unappreciated, underpaid, or haven't obtained the deserved promotion. Often they become rogue & become an internal threat to harm the organization as a form of revenge. According to the Insider Threat Report, 90% of enterprises and organizations feel vulnerable to insider cyber threats.

Black Hat Hackers

Black Hat Hackers can be anyone ranging from script kiddies (in cybersecurity, these are people who lack skills and hack by executing copied scripts) to elite hackers with the techniques and tactics to exploit vulnerabilities or run malware to breach highly secure computer systems and networks. Their main goal can be a personal benefit, a sense of achievement, political edge, or financial gain. While script kiddies will leverage others' code to deface a website or harm a system, elite hackers will explore to find new exploits called "0-day exploits" to carry out their operations.

Natural Disasters

When we get hit by a natural disaster, the first thing that strikes our mind is to save human lives. The security of cyberspace and enterprise digital asset does not come to our mind. Cybercriminals are well aware of this fact. They leverage this opportunity to steal sensitive data or other digital assets in this panic situation. Thus, a natural disaster can severely threaten the organization if not managed effectively.

Privilege Management Errors

Often network admins or top-tier cybersecurity managers accidentally give permissions to someone not meant to get the privilege. Those who have received the ownership can cause a threat to the organization. They often get the permissions given to an authorized user. Such a mishap can lead to privilege abuse by internal or external threats.

Why is it Necessary to Protect Against Cyber Threats?

Organizations should take robust measures to protect against cyber threats because it protects an organization from various categories of cyber attacks and even helps businesses preserve their reputation.

Residual and inherent risks are increasing with the increased infrastructure complications and technological design. Often a data breach or website downtime can cost millions of dollars to the organization.

Since cybercriminals are also leveraging the latest technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, script automation, cloud technology, etc., organizations should take proactive & necessary measures by leveraging modern tools and tactics to protect against cyber threats.

Examples of Cyber Threats

With time, numerous cyber threats have evolved that pose a severe danger to an organization. Now that we know what a cyber threat is, let us explore some examples to get even more clarity on the concept.

Malware

Malware (abbreviation for malicious software) are programs designed to intentionally harm a system, server, or computer network. Some well-known types of malware are ransomware, viruses, Trojan horses, worms, adware, etc. Attackers deliver malware as links, email attachments, or via flash drives.

Spyware

Spyware is a malware designed to silently remain in the victim's system to gather data about that system or its user.

They stealthily spy on the system without the consent of the system's owner and share or send data to the creator/owner of the spyware. These malicious programs help the spyware owner(s) to gain profit from the stolen data.

Phishing Attacks

It is another prevalent cyber threat wherein the attacker tries to steal the victim's data, such as login credentials, personal details, and credit card information. They masquerade as a trusted entity and provoke a target into opening a link from an email or instant messaging app.

The victim considers that site/page legitimate one & fills in the login credentials to gain access. As the victim submits it, the attacker receives the login credentials on the other end. According to Verizon's 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), phishing attack leads to 43 percent of breaches.

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks

A distributed denial of service (DDoS) is a non-intrusive & wicked cyber threat where the attackers attempt to disrupt the regular network traffic of any website, server, network, or web application.

The attack will stress the target system by bombarding the server with fake traffic from zombie systems or infected IoT devices. Thus, users & customers will not be able to access the system or perform regular operations on those websites. It can result in massive business loss. DDoS comes under the top four cyber threats.

Ransomware

Ransomware is a specially-crafted malware program that contaminates one or many target systems by encrypting all data in the target system. It also prevents the target owner from accessing the files/data and asks the system's owner/organization to pay a ransom for releasing those data.

Such an attack vector often takes advantage of network, system, and software vulnerabilities & loopholes or mistakes humans commit. According to a research report and their estimation, by 2025, the cost of ransomware attacks will cause a revenue loss of 10.5 trillion USD (approx.) annually.

Zero-Day Exploits

Zero-day exploits are those cyber threats that come under unknown software vulnerabilities. Often cybercriminals spot these vulnerabilities (before the vendor or owner does) & without reporting that to the vendor, they exploit these vulnerabilities.

Such threats become dangerous because they are sure to succeed as there is no information related to such threats to defend them. Attackers often leak these zero-day techniques publicly in hacking forums or on the dark web for a fee so that other hackers can leverage them.

Advanced Persistent Threats

The Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) is a prolonged and sophisticated cyber attack where an intruder or team of intruders establishes access to a network, and its existence remains undetected for an extended period.

These can trigger long-lasting cyber threats by using persistent, advanced, complicated, and clandestine hacking techniques to establish access to a network and reside within that system for a prolonged period.

Since the Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) needs high-level efforts to carry out such attacks, the team or individual attackers aim for high-value targets, like nation-states and large enterprises, with the ultimate goal of robbing data over a long time.

Supply Chain Attacks

Supply chain attacks, also known as third-party or value-chain attacks, are emerging cyber threats that exploit trust relationships between a third-party vendor or external company tie-ups and an association. Such a relationship can be a vendor relationship or include a partnership or organizations using third-party software.

Taking advantage of these trusted relationships, these cyber-threats target one organization, move up the supply chain, and infiltrate malicious software or code into the application to access the trusted third-party associations' information.

Trojans

Trojans are a specially-crafted, deceptive malware program that looks legitimate and appears to carry out one function but, in the midst, performs another malicious function. Cybercriminals use Trojans for personal benefit or financial gain by damaging, disrupting, stealing, or inflicting some other** malicious activity** on a third-party user's data or network.

These malicious programs work like authentic applications and seek to convince and deceive users into downloading and running the program. Once downloaded, the virus starts spying on the user's activities, causing harm to the system or stealing privacy.

Wiper Attacks

Wiper Attacks are a type of cyber attack where the attacker or attackers wipe or erase data from the victim's system. The term "wiper attack" emerges from its primary function – to wipe out all data from the target system.

The main goal behind such attacks is to wipe, destroy or erase data from the victim's hard disk to avert any recovery options from the system's working.

Wiper attackers perform these cyber attacks by targeting and infecting critical and urgent system files needed for the proper functioning of that system. The central motive to trigger these attacks can be financial gains, personal benefits, sabotage, cyber war, destruction of evidence, etc.

Intellectual Property Theft

By the name itself, as we can see, "Intellectual Property Theft" means stealing another's idea, creative presentation, patent work, or innovation from an individual or an enterprise. Over time, the meaning of this attack has been changing immensely, mainly with the introduction of the latest technologies.

Intellectual Property Theft involves robbing someone's patent, trademark, copyright, business plans, or trade secrets. With the growing market and competition, the possibility of stealing someone's intellectual property is increasing.

Theft of Money

Users using online banking and financial apps are also prone to financial-cyber threats. Cybercriminals use diverse techniques like fake websites, keylogging, phishing, malicious attachments, forged web links, etc., to steal money from users' bank accounts. Thus digital money theft is also a concern for almost every individual and financial institution across the globe.

Data Manipulation

One of the most threatening practices by cyber attackers is data manipulation. Here, the attackers try to access the organization's environment or an individual's data and manipulate or change the original information or tweak and modify the valuable digital assets and essential information instead of robbing the data then and there to sabotage the organization and cause damage. In today's cyber threats, cybersecurity experts and researchers consider data manipulation a serious cybercrime, and rightly so.

Data Destruction

The "data destruction" is a process of destroying data and making it inaccessible and unreadable. Often companies have individuals who feel unrewarded, overworked, underpaid, or have not received the deserved promotion, turn into disgruntled insiders who destroy data from the organization's assets like hard disks, tapes, and other forms of electronic storage media.

It is one of the major cyber threats where the owners of the lost data do not readily access them by the OS or related application they used. The attackers can also destroy the data via degaussing that ultimately eradicates data on magnetic tapes and disk drives by altering the magnetic field.

Man-in-the-Middle Attack (MITM Attack)

In this attack, a third-party individual or group of attackers becomes the perpetrator and interrupts an existing exchange or data transfer between two trusted organizations or individuals.

The goal of such attacks is to steal personal information and gain access to the data while the two individual parties exchange between them. These initiate cyber threats as the information can be someone's account details, login credentials, or credit card numbers.

Cybercriminals can exploit this information obtained for several pursuits, including unapproved fund transfers, identity theft, or an illegal password change.

Drive-by Downloads

Drive-by Downloads are one of the top cyber attacks in the world that refer to malicious programs installed on the device without our consent. These threats also include unintended installations of external files or bundled software onto a computer or mobile device.

It exposes the owner to numerous cyber threats as they were innocent victims unknown of the background download operation. Installing outdated software or external malicious programs can lead to such cyber threats. Cybersecurity experts researched such attacks and found that cybercriminals mainly host reputed websites for Drive-by Downloads cyber attacks.

Malvertising

Malvertising or malicious advertising is a technique of injecting malicious programs inside a digital advertisement over the internet. Recent research found a rapid increase in malware that most cybercriminals often disseminate via malvertising.

Malvertising attackers exploit fair online advertising networks and display malicious advertisements on different websites. Thus innocent victims who visit these infected ads fall at risk of such potential threat of infection. Cybercriminals mainly target massive users who regularly visit highly reputable websites. Internet users and publishers cannot easily detect such malicious programs in the meantime.

Rogue Software

The "Rogue" software is a malicious program that tricks users into believing that they have unknowingly installed a malicious program or virus into their computer. It induces such victims to pay for a fake malware removal application like legitimate antivirus products but, in return, installs malware.

These cyber-attacks increase cyber threats as they are hard to detect, and victims fall prey by believing their fake virus messages. A rogueware attack is a worldwide cyber attack on massive individual users over the Internet that could cost the victim a large amount of money for recovery.

Unpatched Software

Every application at some level has the prospect of having bugs and loopholes, especially the older ones like Windows XP (that don't receive updates from the company). Unpatched software includes vulnerabilities in the program or code.

Unpatched vulnerabilities are a gateway towards ransomware attacks and other different cyber attacks. An individual user can also be responsible for unpatched software if they neglect to update their unpatched application or program and perform regular updates. These eccentric activities can be more harmful to themselves if they ignore such vulnerabilities and increase cyber-attacks.

Data Centre Disrupted by Natural Disaster

When a natural disaster strikes a country, half of the organizations do not prepare to keep their data centers protected and active and preserve a good disaster recovery strategy for the data centers. Some situations like power outages, software interruption, user errors that lead to unintentional malware installations, and hardware failures can cause data breaches in times of natural disasters. At that time, hackers and cybercriminals take advantage of such helpless situations leading to cyber threats.

Recent Biggest Cyber Threats

With the advent of the pandemic, work-from-home (WFH) culture, and recent technological advancements, cyber threats are increasing exponentially. Here are some of the current & biggest cyber threats that enterprise owners and security professionals are worried about nowadays.

Covid-Themed Phishing Attacks

With the pandemic, the use of the internet reached its peak. Also, according to a report, internet users grew by 10.2 percent. That is where cybercriminals and attackers found the opportunity to create fake websites to perform phishing attacks. With the pandemic, the use of the internet reached its peak.

Also, according to a report, internet users grew by 10.2 percent. That is where cybercriminals and attackers found the opportunity to create fake websites to perform phishing attacks. Since users have started using web apps, entertainment software, and online banking, cybercriminals created those fake pages through which they tried stealing login credentials, OTPs, and other financial details.

Many attackers have used the term "covid" to generate a sense of urgency to click the phishing links that redirected them to perform registrations in hospitals and clinics. That way, attackers gathered lots of information about target users. Top companies like Microsoft and Facebook got targeted by phishing attacks in 2021.

Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware threats are also on an upsurge, targeting enterprises and businesses for monetary benefit. According to a study, by 2031, ransomware attacks will happen every 2 seconds (that was 11 seconds in 2021). A ransomware attack stops an enterprise from its seamless workflow.

Ransomware attack vector often takes advantage of the system, network, and software vulnerabilities or mistakes that employees commit unknowingly. Such malware can reside in computers, smartphones, wearables, printers, point-of-sale (POS) servers, or other endpoints.

Other well-known approaches are spam emails, DNS poisoning, USB sticks, drive-by downloads, email attachments, clipboard hijacking, etc. Organizations like the Costa Rica government, Nvidia, SpiceJet, and Toyota faced the 2022's greatest ransomware threat. Recently researchers have encountered various innovative ransomware attack types. These are:

1. Double extortion ransomware: It is a ransomware type that exfiltrates a considerable amount of private data from the target system. It is named "doubt extortion" because it extracts sensitive data from the target system(s) & then encrypts all the data. It then asks for a ransom against the key for decrypting the file. The ransomware threatens to publish or release the victim's private data (on the web) if that victim doesn't pay the ransom.
2. Triple extortion ransomware: It uses three layers to pull the ransom from the compromised victim or firm. The three layers are: Encrypting all files within the infected system > and Threatens to release all sensitive data on the web > Creating pressure on the organization through DDoS attacks.
3. Ransomware-as-Service (RaaS): These are cloud-based ransomware that attackers create to rent access & use a ransomware strain. Often other cybercriminals & adversaries use such services by paying a fee as we do with cloud services. This kind of cyber threat model works like the cloud's SaaS model.

Insider Threats

Insider threats are severe security risks that an employee from within an organization does to the organization out of revenge or to gain monetary benefit. As per Ponemon's 2022 Threat report, insider threat incidents rose to 44 percent over the past two years. It costs more than or up to USD 15.38 million per incident. Very recently, Coca-Cola and OpenSea encountered insider threats that impacted the companies in various aspects.

Supply Chain Attacks

Since the supply chain attack exploits trust relationships between a third-party vendor or external company tie-ups and an association, many companies are worried about collaborating or using third-party tools, libraries, dependencies, and integrations.

Recent supply chain threats came up where cybercriminals breached software vendors for Magento as their developers fell for phishing attacks, leading many Python-based app development companies into trouble. Netgear, Sonatype, IBM, and many other companies are struggling to find a defensive solution against supply chain attacks.

Polyglot Files

Polyglot files are the most friendly files for cybercriminals to exploit a system or server. These files are not becoming a severe threat to a business. Often we encounter situations where an online form asks us to upload files of a specific type (for images - JPG). But cybercriminals introduced a recent attack technique wherein attackers use mixed-type or mixed-format files such as GIFAR (a GIF & a RAR, both).

Attackers use these files to show the system that it is a GIF file, but it binds exploits as a RAR format within the GIFAR (polyglot files). Starchy Taurus (aka APT41) & Evasive Serpens are hacker groups that have manipulated CHM files to hide payloads created using PowerShell or JavaScript. They used such polyglot files to bypass anti-malware scans.

DDoS Attacks

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are some of the most prominent cyber threats that have been populating news headlines recently. Whether a small startup or a global conglomerate/organization, any online services — websites, servers, email services, or any other internet-facing service can get compromised through DDoS. Some recent DDoS incidents that companies & systems have faced are a US airport site & the Norway government site by Russian hackers. Their websites and servers were down, causing tremendous losses to those businesses.

How to Protect Against and Identify Cyber Threats?

Since cyber threats are evolving rapidly as a danger to all businesses, irrespective of any sector, companies should know particular strategies to identify and protect against such threats.

1. Enterprises should create cybersecurity strategies, security policies, and risk assessment guidelines to identify & defend against different cyber threats.

2. Organizations must educate their employees against various cyber threats that exist. Also, the organization should run dummy phishing campaigns to see if anyone becomes a victim.

3. Enterprises should deploy an intrusion detection system (IDS), intrusion prevention system (IPS), next-generation firewalls, internet security suite, etc., to filter all inbound and outbound data packets. These systems can easily detect threats and notify the security professional about a breach.

4. Adding multiple authentication factors can also help secure an account. That way, cybercriminals cannot gain access to the account through password guessing, phishing, keylogging, or other social engineering attacks.

5. Endpoint protection also helps secure networks & systems that remain remotely connected to various devices. Laptops, mobile devices, IoT systems, etc., get protected through endpoint protection techniques.

6. Usually, creating a backup or redundant data saves a company from various cyber threats. Companies can prevent cyber threats like ransomware attacks through data backup. Again, redundant data stored in multiple servers in different geolocations can also control downtime due to a DDoS attack on a particular server.

7. Companies should also leverage penetration testers to check the apps and internal systems to identify vulnerabilities and fix them as per the penetration testing reports.