Does it feel like the cybersecurity landscape keeps changing beneath your feet? In the past two years, we’ve witnessed the definition of cybersecurity risks evolve and new types of security threats emerge. If you were to list out today’s top cybersecurity threats, it would likely look different that it did before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Let’s face it, you can’t anticipate and mitigate today’s cybersecurity risks if you’re stuck playing catch-up in this new landscape. That’s why we’ve created a new ebook – How Modern Security Team’s Fight Today’s Cyber Threats – which uses Cisco Secure threat intelligence to give IT teams an understanding of the top threats facing their network as well as the cybersecurity solutions needed to defend against them.
In today’s blog, we’ll give you an overview of four different types of security threats your enterprise currently faces. Once you’ve finished reading, download our free ebook to learn some ways that your team can rise to meet them.
Threat #1: A Move Away From the Campus Network
In the span of weeks in early 2020, the pandemic upended where many of us work from. In the years since then, fully remote and hybrid work has gone mainstream. In fact, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2022:
…31% of all workers worldwide will be remote (a mix of hybrid and fully remote). The U.S. will lead in terms of remote workers in 2022, accounting for 53% of the U.S. workforce.1
This may be great news for employees looking to permanently say goodbye to long commutes or uncomfortable office shoes. But for IT teams that used the campus network to push updates out to endpoints, it creates a new cybersecurity risk.
Unpatched software almost always tops lists of cybersecurity threats facing companies. And you don’t need to look very far to see the damage it can cause. The Apache Log4j vulnerability, which made headlines in December 2021, opened the door for cyber criminals to infiltrate everything from game servers to big-name cloud services.
The easiest way to ensure software gets patched is to perform regular updates. Unfortunately, many IT teams can no longer count on pushing these updates out to endpoints when users connect to the campus network.
Threat #2: More Personal Devices on the Company Network
For many, “work from home” has muddied the distinction between work life and personal life. The same can be said of work and personal devices. Your remote employees are more likely to use personal mobile devices to join a work call, check their email, or download reports. This creates a blind spot for security teams – safeguarding company resources in the cloud is more difficult when don’t have visibility on the endpoints accessing them.
Unknown and unmanaged endpoints frequently leave organizations vulnerable to different types of cybersecurity threats. Many users regularly connect to free, public WiFi whenever available, increasing the risk of company data being communicated across an unsecure network. And if these personal devices are ever lost or stolen, any data stored on them is easily compromised.
Threat #3: An Uptick in the Volume of CyberAttacks
Few, if any, IT teams were prepared for the speed at which cybersecurity has changed recently. And while many teams have scrambled to augment outdated security stacks to strengthen protection, cyber criminals have moved just as quickly to take advantage of the situation.
Over the past two years, our threat analysts found that:
61% of organizations experienced a jump of 25% or more in cyberthreats or alerts since the start of COVID-19.2
This dramatic increase in the volume of attacks means that many security teams get bombarded with notifications. The increased risk makes it difficult to strengthen cybersecurity posture, since many teams tied up dealing with alerts.
Threat #4: More Sophisticated Cyberattacks
Unfortunately for modern security teams, today’s cyber attackers aren’t sacrificing quality for quantity. Our threat analysts have found that, in addition to an increase in volume, new cyberattacks also exhibit increased complexity that can make them particularly dangerous.
For example, modern attacks are significantly more likely to have multiple stages that exposes companies to different kinds of risks. A ransomware attack can lock users out of the company network while also exfiltrating sensitive data to sell on the dark web.
What types of these new cybersecurity attacks pose the greatest threat? Here’s what we found:
- 86% of organizations experienced phishing
- 69% of organizations experienced unsolicited cryptomining
- 50% of organizations experienced ransomware
- 48% of organizations experienced information-stealing malware
Since the evolution of the top cybersecurity attacks poses a very real threat to company networks, finding a cybersecurity solution backed by solid, actionable intelligence is a must for modern security teams.
How Do You Face Today’s Top Cybersecurity Threats?
In our ebook, How Modern Security Teams Fight Today’s Cyber Threats, we dig into the cybersecurity solutions uniquely suited to meet these challenges. DNS-layer security is a tool that is particularly well-suited to help modern IT teams rise to the occasion, since it provides protection at the foundation of the internet.
Download our ebook today to learn more. Or, if you’re ready to see how Cisco Umbrella stands up to today’s top cybersecurity threats, schedule a free demo!
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1 Gartner, Gartner Forecasts 51% of Global Knowledge Workers Will Be Remote by the End of 2021. Laurence Goasduff, 22 June 2021.
2 Cisco, Future of Secure Remote Work Report.
