Cybersecurity Threats for Businesses In Covid-19

Oliver Smith
Shufti Pro
Published in
3 min readJul 29, 2020

Over the past few years, the risk and severity of cyber-attacks have clearly grown. Mankind has witnessed the most horrific cases of cybercrimes related to massive data breaches, flaws in microchips, cryptojacking, and many others. The advancement of technology and the wide use of digital media is making attackers smarter by the day. Further, these cybercriminals take advantage of individuals and businesses who pay less heed to cybersecurity. They target everything to gain access to sensitive information.

Cybersecurity threats like ransomware, phishing, or IoT-based attacks are making the headlines. In this article, we’ll discuss cybersecurity threats that businesses need to be aware of. Businesses need to learn some tips to protect themselves from cybercriminals. Cybersecurity is all about staying ahead of threats before they cause damage to businesses. This year has come with a whole new level of cybersecurity threats for businesses as they are operating online only.

3 Key Themes of Cyber Threats

According to a report by Threat Horizon, in the coming years, businesses are feared to l face cyber threats under three key themes:

Disruption

Cybercriminals will be using ransomware as a weapon to hijack the Internet of Things. So companies that depend on fragile internet connections will compromise business operations in the hands of cybercrimes. So these types of attacks need to be mitigated. Especially companies that are implementing WFH policy are at higher risk.

Distortion

Spread of false information by automated bots can cause compromise of trust in the integrity of information.

Deterioration

Advancements in technologies and conflicting demands by evolving security will have a negative impact on businesses’ ability to control information.

3 Cybersecurity Threats for Businesses

Cybersecurity is all about staying ahead rather than managing them later. So following types of cybersecurity threats will be discussed:

  • Cloud Vulnerability

According to a report, cloud vulnerability will continue to be one of the major cybersecurity challenges faced by businesses. As businesses are leveraging cloud applications and storing sensitive data on the cloud. The adoption of the cloud is generating new challenges for businesses and worsening the old ones.

Forbes reported that 83 percent of business data workload will be on the cloud this year making them tempting targets for malicious hackers. Data breach, account hijacking, malicious threats will continue to haunt businesses failing to invest in a robust cloud security strategy. Cloud companies like Google and Amazon storing other companies’ data are investing in improving their cloud security and trying to make themselves immune to deep cyber intrusions.

  • AI Fuzzing

With traditional fuzzing techniques to integrate AI, a tool is created that detects system vulnerabilities. This technology can be a boon or a bane as it can be used by cybercriminals to start, automate, and accelerate zero-day attacks.

  • Machine Learning Poisoning

If a hacker targets a machine learning model and injects his own instructions in it, the system becomes vulnerable to attacks and also exploits user-generated information such as satisfaction ratings, purchasing histories, or web traffic. Cybercriminals can potentially use malicious samples or Trojans to poison training sets and compromise the system.

So businesses need to be aware of all the cybersecurity risks and always plan to tackle such attacks. Cybersecurity training of employees is the need of the hour.

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Oliver Smith
Shufti Pro

Oliver Smith is a technical writer and editor. His tech-education and journalism has provided him with a wide knowledge base related to technology.