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Top Cybersecurity Threats and Vulnerabilities to Keep an Eye On

Bineesh Mathew | March 31, 2022 | 329 views

Cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities are prevalent in all types of businesses, from Fortune 500 companies to mom-and-pop shops. The basic fact is that there are far too many risks to counteract all of them adequately.

According to Kaspersky Lab, a leading antivirus company, “The number of new malicious files processed by Kaspersky Lab’s in-lab detection technologies reached 360,000 a day in 2017.” This contributes to 250 new malware threats every minute.

When it comes to cybersecurity threats and network vulnerabilities, malware is not the only thing to be worried about. Hackers can steal your data and sensitive information.


Cybersecurity Threats and Vulnerabilities: The Difference

To put it simply, vulnerabilities are weaknesses or flaws in a system or network that could be exploited to bring harm or allow an attacker to manipulate the system in some way.

This differs from a cyber-threat. Computer system vulnerabilities are the weaknesses and flaws present in the system, unlike a cyber threat. Cybercriminals will also use these flaws in their attacks, but they aren't usually the result of a deliberate plan. I short, vulnerabilities lead to cybersecurity threats.

How a computer cybersecurity vulnerability is exploited is determined by the nature of the exposure and the attacker's motivations. For example, these problems could be caused by software programs that don't work well together, system parts that don't work well together, or flaws in a single application.


Top Cybersecurity Threats and Vulnerabilities of the Year


Internet of Thing Devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) includes many smart devices, such as Wi-Fi-equipped refrigerators, printers, factory robots, coffee makers, and countless other appliances. The challenge with these devices is that attackers can use them to create slaved networks of compromised devices to carry out additional attacks. Worse yet, many firms are unaware of how many IoT devices they have on their networks. This means they are unaware of the risks and possible threats they are exposed to, as well as the vulnerabilities to information security.

These unknown devices provide countless opportunities for attackers and increase the vulnerability risk in cybersecurity for corporations.

To reduce the network security threats and vulnerabilities of IoT devices, a security audit should be conducted that identifies the diverse assets of the network and the operating systems they use. In this manner, the company's cybersecurity plan can effectively account for these IoT devices. In addition, audits like these should be done regularly to account for any new devices added to the network over time.


Phishing Attacks or Social Engineering

In a phishing attack, the attacker tries to persuade an employee of the targeted organization to divulge important information and account credentials by prompting them to download malware. The most common attack is through identical emails from one of your company's vendors or someone from a higher level.

One such example of a phishing email is: "This is Mark from IT. Your user account has shown unusual behavior. Please click this link to reset and secure your password." When you click the link in the email, it directs users to a website that downloads malware and compromises their machine. Other phishing scams may try to get people to handover their user account credentials to the attacker to resolve a problem.


Malware

New malware is generated regularly. The figure of 360,000 new malware files every day may appear alarming. Many of these new malware files are simply rehashes of earlier malware programs that have been tweaked just enough to make them unidentifiable to antivirus software.

However, numerous new types of malware have been developed over time, such as ransomware, trojans, and worms, each uniquely affecting the target's systems.


Security Vulnerabilities That Are Unpatched

As new sophisticated threats are produced regularly, companies have to find sophisticated ways to tackle them perfectly. Malware is looking to exploit the same cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities repeatedly. Failing to patch those cybersecurity vulnerabilities, once they're discovered, it can be dangerous for companies.

It's all too usual for a company—or even individual users on a network—to ignore the ‘update available’ warnings that appear in some programs because they don't want to waste the 5-10 minutes to perform the update. These updates can save a company a lot of time and money and save from threats. Thus, it is good for companies to update programs regularly.


Backdoor Programs that Are Hidden

This is an example of a computer cybersecurity vulnerability that was purposefully engineered. Usually, a backdoor is a piece of software or code that is installed by the manufacturer of computer parts, software, or entire machines. This allows the manufacturer to access a computer remotely for diagnostic, configuration, or technical support purposes.

A hidden backdoor program installs a backdoor into a computer without the knowledge of the user. Secret backdoors are a significant software flaw because it is easy to gain unauthorized access and affect the computer system and the networks to which it is connected.


Employees

The employees working for an organization are considered to be cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Most data breaches can be traced back to an employee due to intentional mistake or an accident.

Employees, for example, may take advantage of their access credentials for personal gain. Alternatively, an employee could click on the wrong link in an email, download the wrong file from a website, or give the wrong person their user account credentials, giving attackers simple access to your systems.

Using a least privilege policy, for example, prevents users from having too much data at once, making it difficult for them to steal data. Another benefit of cybersecurity awareness training is that it helps employees recognize phishing and other social engineering-style attacks and not fall for them.


Software or Programming Interfaces With Unknown Security Flaws

Computer software is complicated to comprehend. The complexity of a system grows exponentially as two or more programs interact with one another. The problem is that there may be programming flaws and conflicts inside a single piece of software, resulting in cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities. When two applications are linked together, the chance of disputes that result in software flaws increases.

Programming errors and unexpected code interactions are the most frequent cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals constantly seek new ways to exploit them. Unfortunately, forecasting the emergence of these threats and vulnerabilities to information security is not possible because of the infinite number of software combinations that can exist on a single computer, let alone an entire network.


3 Ways to Find and Prevent Cybersecurity Threats and Vulnerabilities

Identifying vulnerabilities in cybersecurity before an attacker can exploit is one of the essential steps in preventing a security breach. Many firms, however, does not have the tools and expertise to identify network security threats and vulnerabilities.

Here are some ways to find threats and vulnerabilities in information security:
  • Audit Your Network Assets
  • Penetration Testing
  • Create a Threat Intelligence Framework


Summing Up

Cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities have become too sophisticated as our dependency on digital technologies grows. It is because of this companies that use outdated cybersecurity techniques are at a risk of being hacked. Organizations must improve their cybersecurity program to avoid risks. An effective cybersecurity program can assist firms in preventing attacks, reducing recovery time, and containing future risks.


Frequently Asked  Questions


What do you mean by cyber threats and vulnerability?

Vulnerabilities are gaps in a system that allow threats to occur and let threat actors take advantage of the data. It is called a threat when the chance of an attack is multiplied by the possible loss.


What are some of the vulnerabilities in cybersecurity?

Network vulnerabilities, operating system vulnerabilities, human vulnerabilities, and process vulnerabilities are some of the vulnerabilities in cybersecurity.


What is the difference between vulnerability and threat?

A threat is a process that increases the possibility of an adverse event, such as a vulnerability being exploited. On the other hand, exposure is a flaw in your infrastructure, networks, or apps that could expose you to threats.

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Prnewswire | March 27, 2023

Vectra AI, the leader in AI-driven hybrid cloud threat detection and response, today announced the introduction of Vectra Match. Vectra Match brings intrusion detection signature context to Vectra Network Detection and Response (NDR), enabling security teams to accelerate their evolution to AI-driven threat detection and response without sacrificing investments already made in signatures. "As enterprises transform embracing digital identities, supply chains and ecosystems - GRC and SOC teams are forced to keep pace. Keeping pace with existing, evolving and emerging cyber threats requires visibility, context and control for both known and unknown threats. The challenge for many security organizations is doing so without adding complexity and cost," says Kevin Kennedy, SVP Products at Vectra. With the addition of Vectra Match, Vectra NDR addresses core GRC and SOC use cases enabling more efficient and effective: Correlation and validation of threat signals for accuracy. Compliance for network-based CVE detection with compensating controls. Threat hunting, investigation and incident response processes. "CISOs and their SOC teams across Asia Pacific are working with a challenging lack of visibility across their hybrid cloud environments, as attackers continue to evolve. Vectra NDR now enables security teams to unify signatures for known threats and AI-driven behavior-based detection for unknown threats in a single solution," comments David Sajoto, Vice President Vectra Asia Pacific Japan. According to Gartner®, "recent trends in the NDR market indicate many NDR offerings have expanded to capture new categories of events and to analyze additional traffic patterns. This includes new detection techniques: by adding support for more traditional signatures, performance monitoring, threat intelligence and sometimes malware detection engines. This move toward more multifunction network detection aligns well with the use case of network/security operations convergence, but also with midsize enterprises."1 "The attack surface cyber attackers have at their disposal continues to grow exponentially creating unknown threats on top of the tens of thousands of known vulnerabilities that exist. Attackers simply have exponentially more ways to infiltrate an organization and exfiltrate data -- and do so with far more frequency, velocity and impact. Keeping pace with attackers exploiting known vulnerabilities and unknown threats is an immense challenge for every Security, Risk and Compliance officer," says Ronald Heil, Global Risk Advisory Lead for Energy and Natural Resources and Partner at KPMG Netherlands. "Today, cyber-resilience and compliance requires complete visibility and context for both known and unknown attacker methods. Without it, disrupting and containing their impact becomes an exercise in brand reputation and customer trust damage control. Vectra Match capabilities allow us to combine both worlds, having the continued AI-based detection of real-time "movement", while also having the ability to check against specific Suricata indicators -- often required during incident response or proof of compliancy (e.g., Log4J). Consolidating AI-based and signature-based detection enables optimization, because in our case, less is more." "When it comes to shadow IT, we know people with admin rights are 'building boxes off the grid.' Our SOC team cannot protect what we cannot see, thus making these unknown systems prime targets for attackers. No doubt, behavior-based AI-driven detections are great for catching attackers deploying new, evasive methods, but when it comes to attackers leveraging CVEs to compromise unknown, unpatched systems, we need signature-based detection. Combining signature-based detection with behavior-based detection gives our SOC team visibility for both the known-unknown and unknown-unknown threats. It's the best of both worlds," says Brett Fernicola, Sr. Director, Security Operations at Anywhere.re. Vectra NDR with Vectra Match Vectra NDR - a key component of the Vectra platform - provides end-to-end protection against hybrid and multicloud attacks. Deployed on-premises or in the cloud, the Vectra NDR console is a single source of truth (visibility) and first line of defense (control) for attacks traversing cloud and data center networks. By harnessing AI-driven Attack Signal Intelligence, Vectra NDR empowers GRC and SOC teams with: AI-driven Detections that think like an attacker by going beyond signatures and anomalies to understand attacker behavior and zero in on attacker TTPs across the entire cyber kill chain post compromise, with 90% fewer blind spots and 3x more threats proactively identified. AI-driven Triage that knows what is malicious by utilizing ML to analyze detection patterns unique to the customer's environment to score how meaningful each detection is, thus reducing 85% of alert noise - surfacing only relevant true positive events that require analyst attention. AI-driven Prioritization that focuses on what is urgent by automatically correlating attacker TTPs across attack surfaces, evaluating each entity against globally observed attack profiles to create an attack urgency rating enabling analysts to focus on the most critical threats to the organization. Vectra NDR empowers security and risk professionals with next-level intrusion detection. Armed with rich context on both known and unknown threats, GRC and SOC teams not only improve the effectiveness of their threat detection, but the efficiency on their threat hunting, investigation and incident response program and processes. Vectra NDR with Vectra Match is available for evaluation and purchase today. For additional information, please visit the following resources. About Vectra Vectra® is the leader in Security AI-driven hybrid cloud threat detection and response. Only Vectra optimizes AI to detect attacker methods - the TTPs at the heart of all attacks - rather than simplistically alerting on "different." The resulting high-fidelity threat signal and clear context enables cybersecurity teams to rapidly respond to threats and stop attacks from becoming breaches. The Vectra platform and services cover public cloud, SaaS applications, identity systems and network infrastructure - both on-premises and cloud-based. Organizations worldwide rely on the Vectra platform and services for resilience to ransomware, supply chain compromise, identity takeovers, and other cyberattacks impacting their organization.

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