Question 7

Top 5 Cyber Security Risks of 2015

How they have been enabled and how they can be avoided.

In today's world, cyber security has never been more important for businesses, organizations and governments. Hacking has become a daily occurrence and caution needs to be taken in order to avoid it. Discussing the top 5 cyber security risks from last year, we can better understand how severe the problems are and what to do about it.

1. Ransomware, "a type of malware which restricts access to the computer system that it infects –will become increasingly sophisticated in its methods and targets, experts at McAfee Labs warned" (Ellyatt, 2015). It has been predicted that ransomware variants that manage to evade security software installed on a system will specifically target endpoints that subscribe to cloud-based storage solutions such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.We saw this happen when famous celebrities had their private i-cloud accounts hacked and pictures were leaked online.

2. The Internet of Things, "the connection of physical devices such as home appliances and cars to the internet -- will still be the 'Internet of Vulnerabilities,' according to cyber experts (Ellyatt, 2015).

3. Cyber-espionage, is becoming the weapon of choice for many government organizations. Some predict that the next world war will be fought on a key board and that 2015 can expect more frequent cyber-espionage attacks.

4. Cyber-theft, Mainly the stealing of financial information has always been a major problem online. And not only credit cards, now that mobile payments or contact less payment are becoming the norm in most of our first world countries, hackers have a new opening, a new platform to work off.

5. Insecure Passwords, easy to crack passwords will still be a problem in 2015. It doesn't take a brainiac or seasoned hacker to crack a password. And not that its always a large scale theft issue, but high profile accounts like the celebrity i-cloud attacks recently is a good example of how bad it can get.

Recently, we saw that telecommunications giant, Apple, refused to enable their iOS hacking cloud for the FBI after a iPhone was discovered in the house of the San Bernardino shooters earlier this year. Their argument: it would compromise user privacy. 

This is a debatable subject, but at least we know that more recent i-phones are becoming more difficult to hack. I mean, if the FBI cant even hack it, its safe to say that your content is safe, for now.

There are different kinds of data that companies can use. To name a few..

1. Conduct a security audit; If you don’t know what parts of your business are vulnerable or what data you have that needs to be protected, you can’t properly secure it. It is critical that you work with a professional to audit your entire IT infrastructure, computers, network, and mobile devices, to determine what you need to do to prevent hackers from accessing your network

2. Use strong and multiple passwords.

3. Backup;  Ensure that your data is properly backed up, and test the backup to ensure that your data can be recovered when you need it.

4. Implement a multi-security-technology solution; Hackers, and their attacks, are more sophisticated than ever, and it is critical to have multiple layers of security technology on all your different devices.


Reference List

Ellyatt, H. (2015). Top 5 cybersecurity risks for 2015. CNBC. [Accessed on 31 April 2016] Available from: <http://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/19/top-5-cyber-security-risks-for-2015.html>