THE TOP CYBERSECURITY THREATS OF 2020

TOP CYBERSECURITY THREATS- Crippled services, decades’ worth of lost legal documents, millions of dollars in recovery — that’s the fallout from just one recent high-profile cybersecurity assault: the 2018 ransomware attack on Atlanta.

It was a wakeup call not just for municipalities, but for anyone with valuable assets and a modem. While cyberattacks can cost as little as $30 per month to wage, they cost businesses more than $45 billion in losses last year alone. There’s a tremendous emotional toll as well.

“We watch the human effects of this,” Kelley Misata, a member of Women in CyberSecurity (WiCyS) and the founder of Sightline Security, told Built In. “I think one of the hardest parts of security is people feel the pain of it. Victims are left feeling stupid and violated.”

So what should organizations watch for? Nothing too fancy, it turns out. Despite a proliferation of transformative technology, cyber-criminals typically rely on the tried and true. According to security professionals we spoke with, they’re not yet leveraging newfangled tech like artificial intelligence and machine learning — a small number of nation state-backed organized syndicates notwithstanding. Nonetheless, traditional methods are continuously evolving and new vulnerabilities emerging.

Here are five major cybersecurity threats that organizations should keep an eye on in 2020.

Phishing

PHISHING AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING

“What’s new is what’s old,” said Kelvin Coleman, director of the National Cyber Security Alliance. Traditional phishing attacks (when cybercriminals try to obtain sensitive information, like passwords or financial information) are “still extremely prevalent and still extremely effective. If they weren’t, bad actors wouldn’t use them.”

Phishing attacks — of both the targeted and broad sweep variety — are among the predominant threats for nonprofits, too, according to Misata. “And many of these nonprofits don’t have the alert systems built into their network infrastructures to be able to say, ‘Oh my God, something’s going sideways. We better look at it.”

Threats like CEO-fraud spear-phishing and cross-site scripting attacks are both on the rise. In order to combat those incursions and many others, experts say, educational awareness and training is vital.

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Article Credit: Builtin