The critical importance of Firewalls

Last year, our internal security systems detected and suppressed over two million individual threats targeted at our customers. These threats ranged from minor hacking attempts, through to ransomware distribution, DDoS, Intrusion attempts etc. Without protection in place, these threats could have devastated our customers’ IT environments.

It’s little wonder that with statistics like these business and enterprise users are rushing to lock down and secure their environments. According to TechRadar “Companies could incur $5.2tn in additional costs and lost revenue over the next five years due to cyberattacks”. Accenture Surveyed over 1,700 CEO and other C-suite executives to compile its ‘Securing the Digital Economy: Reinventing the Internet for Trust’ report which examines the complexities of Internet-related challenges facing businesses. The new cyber threat environment has expanded well beyond worms, trojans and rootkits. In this article, we will explore how new threats are taking advantage of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to exploit corporate networks.

Trending Cyber Security Threats

According to Fortinet’s threat landscape predictions for 2019 attacks are becoming smarter. Using AI, the threat landscape is growing at an alarming rate with emerging malicious trends.

AI Fuzzing

AI Fuzzing, or Fuzzing as it’s more commonly known, is an advanced method of cybercrime that uses complex technology to determine vulnerabilities in hardware and software applications. The technology injects invalid, unexpected, or semi-random data into an interface or program and then monitoring for events such as crashes, undocumented jumps to debug routines, failing code assertions, and potential memory leaks.

DDoS for Hire / Swarms-as-a-Service

“Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS)” / “Swarm as a service” offerings, often disguised as legitimate “stress testing” services, continue to increase in the cyber underground market. This relatively new Crime-as-a-Service trend has created an entry point for novice DDoS attackers, offering a simple option to anonymously attack nearly anyone and force it offline for a small fee.

With the increased use of IOT devices that continue to remain unmanaged and not updated provides the perfect opportunity for devices to be compromised. Further to the compromisation of these devices the threat also remains that the devices would be used for these cyber ‘As a Service’ offerings. A prime example of this in recent times is the Mirai botnet.

Cryptojacking

Another trend in cyber-attacks is the increase in crypto jacking due to the changing price in bitcoin. With increases in bitcoin value comes an associated increases in crypto jacking. Cryptojacking is a method used to mine cryptocurrencies on devices using CPU resources undetected in the background of a user’s device.

Protecting your business in the new cyber threat environment

These cyber-attacks are only a selection of the new threats businesses must be aware of. There are many more critical attacks that exploit your business network unless you have the appropriate security systems in place. Best practice for business and enterprise IT infrastructure includes having a ‘defense in depth’ architecture, including network segmentation strategy and content inspection in multiple points of the network.

With the use of AI and an increase in the different methods of cyber-attacks show that standalone point devices and platforms aren’t as effective as multiple touch points. Furthermore, working with a solutions partner is crucial to ensure that you have the best solution in place for the whole of your business and not just in one area. Bendigo Telco offers a Cyber Security Consultation, get in touch today to see what improvements can better your network security.