As you’re doing your planning and thinking about the year, we want to give you some advice on the biggest security threats to businesses and organizations in 2023, and how you can protect against these threats.
Because while you may have implemented several new measures over the last few years, the hackers have also upped their game. They are doing more, so you have to do more.
Here are the top three cybersecurity threats in 2023:
1. Email hacks
During the pandemic, cyber criminals upped their attacks on personal and corporate emails. They took advantage of the fact that many employees were working from home, exploiting hybrid work infrastructure to find a way in.
Hackers are harvesting information from those hacks, and then they’re doing all sorts of nefarious things to make money, such as getting money wired to the wrong place, or having invoices paid to the wrong people.
And even scarier, you might not even know you’ve been hacked. At Techify, we’ve come across businesses that didn’t know that they had compromised email accounts until we onboarded them as new clients.
2. Ransomware
Every year, this becomes a bigger issue for businesses and organizations. We have progressed from ransomware that just led to business interruption, to ransomware that allows hackers to steal your data and threaten to expose it.
When a business gets hit by ransomware, it will take days — if not weeks — to deal with it and recover. In fact, a survey of Canadian businesses found that only 42% of organizations who paid the ransom had their data completely restored (Source: The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security – National Cyber Threat Assessment 2023-2024)
3. Malware
Malware is software designed to infect a computer system without the owners’ consent. Examples include computer viruses, spyware, adware and worms.
So, what do you do?
Do you panic? Do you say, ‘Hey, we’re just going to get hacked?’
No, here’s what you are going to do — you need to put in place a cybersecurity roadmap that plans out the next 12 months.
How do you develop that roadmap? There should be a process in place of constantly reviewing your environment against cybersecurity best practices (there are hundreds of these that we utilized for our clients).
These best practices include everything from how the firewall is set up, to how the backend of your Microsoft 365 accounts connects to your computers, to your data.
In addition, somebody on your team needs to be constantly auditing, reviewing and aligning to best practices. That allows risks to be identified in your environment, which then flow up to an executive level.
In addition to the cybersecurity roadmap, something we’re asking all of our clients to do in the coming year is thinking about putting in place enhanced cybersecurity monitoring and threat hunting.
In the industry, these are known as SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) and SOC (Security Operations Centre) services. While these used to be a “nice to have” for most enterprises, they are now a “must have.”
There are just too many threats out there. And the cost to businesses when you don’t quickly identify if compromised email accounts or malware on the system, is huge.
It pays to be proactive.
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Want to learn more about how to protect your organization’s data? We would be happy to assess any vulnerabilities, and provide solutions. Let’s chat.
