29 May 2019

Top 10 Most Disturbing Cyber Attack Tactics in 2019

Makke Priyanka

Nowadays many small and large scale industries are facing security issues due to the cyber attack. From the past few years, cyber attack tactics have increased and massive data is being grabbed and misused by many black hat people across many industries.

Regardless of whether you work in the affected industries, it’s essential to understand the attack details and the advice provided by CERT to help organizations better secure their perimeters. Previously, they might have targeted the energy industry, but today it could be education, finance, healthcare, or other sectors.

The world of Cybercrime is changing every single day. The best thing to stay safe is to stay educated on the threats litany that lurks on the web. Hope this information hub will help you to learn everything required to gain knowledge about cyber threats and avoid them.

As per my knowledge, recent research results have proven that most of the companies have less protection to their data because of their poor cybersecurity practices at their workstations, thus making them vulnerable to data loss.
Data Corruption by Negligence


The increasing amount of large scale industries, Well-publicized breaches tells that it’s not all about the number of security breaches are going up – they are increasing in severity as well.

Cyber Attack Tactics

1. Microsoft office extensions mostly used by email hackers as the most malicious file extension.

Microsoft office has huge recognition and widely used software products in the world. So, we don’t need to be surprised that Microsoft extension has been used by the email hackers as a malicious file extension.

According to the Cisco report regarding cybersecurity issues in 2018 that Microsoft extension is the most malicious file extension in emails. The most famous file extensions for mail hackers were Microsoft Work, powerpoint and Excel formats.

As per my research, I can see that the majority of the malicious file extensions (38%) were Microsoft Office extensions. .zip and .jar extensions are the next two major dangerous formats. They account for 14% of the malicious file formats. However, hackers exploit these to insert malicious code.

2. Americans consider that cybercrimes are more dangerous than Violent Crimes

A recent survey named Gallup in America found that most of the American feel that cybercrime is a most dangerous threat. Gallup conducted this survey in the period between 2000 to 2018. The report is comprehensive in the sense that it has genuine data Which spans across 18 years.

71% of the Americans has a fear that their business information and credit card information will be grabbed by the thefts.
67% of citizens suggest that they become victims of identity theft. Identity theft is still one of the major problems in today’s world.
17% of the people worry about being a victim of a murderer.
7% of the people still getting fear assaulted by their colleagues.
Violent acts such as getting murdered, sexually assaulted or becoming a victim of terrorism becomes secondary threats when compared with cybercrimes.

3. Almost 73% of the companies are fed up to deal with cyber attacks

As I mentioned above data breaches cost of organizations average millions of dollars.

The frequency of cyber attacks increasing every year, and it doesn’t seem to stop at any point. Yet 70% of the companies are not prepared to face cyber attacks.

The Hiscox cyber readiness report announces that they conducted a survey of more than 4000 organizations. The survey extended to highly developed countries like the US, UK, Germany, and the Netherlands.

However, it is clear that most of the organizations not prepared for cyber attacks. until these organizations establish mechanisms to tackle cybersecurity issues, they will have to bear millions of losses in dollars.

4. Malicious cyber attacks are the main reason behind data breaches

Cyber attacks by hackers are not the complete reason for 100% of data breaches occurring these days. There are several factors that affect data breaches. The primary causes of the most dangerous data breaches according to the IBM and ponemon’s case of data breach study are listed as follows.

5. Humans Errors (27%)

Human reasons like mere negligence are the main reason behind huge data breaches. This happens because of officers and contractors improper focus on their jobs and makes mistakes.

As per the recent report, human errors account for 27% of total breaches. To detect minor mistakes before they affect by data breaches they should establish comprehensive semantic. However human errors are the reason for $128 in the organization by each user.

6. System Glitches (25%)

As products did bye the humans, the software can also get mistakes too. the system glitches can cause major issues if the mechanism was not established properly to control them. In the reports, the statement given by the experts that system glitches are responsible for a quarter of the total data breaches. System glitches can cause damage up to $131 by each user.

7. Malicious Cyber Attacks (48%)

These data breaches are easy to identify apart from all the data breaches. Hackers always look for a weak point in systems and use these points to get access to the system. Their targeted businesses are organizations with malicious intent to data breach and make huge losses to organizations.

8. The average cost of data breaches worldwide is 3.6 million

The cost of data breach study suggests that data breaches cost 3.6 million on average of worldwide. This is an amazing figure. However, the latest report announces that these numbers are growing.

For the latest version of the study, IBM and ponemon institute conducted an investigation about these matters. They took the interview over 2200 data protection and compliance professionals they were different from 477 companies. These professionals are facing data breach from the last 12 months.

And finally, this investigation announces that the cost of a data breach was $3.9 million on an average. This means the global cost has increased gradually at almost 6.4% in just 12 months.

9. Experts finalize that the global cost of cybercrimes will grow past $2 trillion this Year

The future of “cybercrime security: Financial and corporate threats & Mitigation” reports by juniper Research unearths some amazing predictions.

As per the report, Global-wide cybercrime cost will exceed the total $2 trillion in 2019. This estimation is based on what the same report predicted just four years ago in 2015.
10. In 2019 the most dangerous cyber threat is Crypto-jacking

I think most of the people didn’t hear about crypto-jacking before, No problem the term was recently named after the rise of cryptocurrencies. The necessity of cryptocurrencies kick-started a competition between crypto-miners to earn coins. By these, some miners result in malpractice to earn coins for themselves. This is the primary reason for them to start hijacking CPUs and perform mining.

Conclusion:

Cybercriminals representing the major threat to companies, organizations, and governments as well, its easy to that they are not only threats or even the biggest ones. In most hard situations the critical threats to companies, organizations are their own lack of adequate defenses and employees who won’t focus on cyber threats.

Organizations and companies can reduce their risk by cyber attacks by implementing the following industry best practices and implementing key measures like encryption and employee training.

If you know any of the recent cybersecurity and tactics, I will always invite you to comment.

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