A glimpse through the most common types of cyberattacks businesses face today

Cyberattacks have spearheaded to become more than common over the past few years. Even powerful companies like Adobe, Sony, Target, and others have faced major cyber attacks by cyber criminals and frauds.

A recent study in 2018 revealed that a record-high of 10.52 billion malware attacks were identified in 2018. These statistics do not surprise the cybersecurity experts as they believe cybercrimes might prove to be more profitable than illicit drug trafficking.

Here are some of the most common types of cyberattacks that businesses face today.

1. Brute-force attacks:

In this type of cyberattack, cybercriminals guess the passwords of accounts with confidential information through the trial-and-error method. They try all the combinations of passwords, passphrases, digits, and others until they can unlock the account. Cybercriminals use the brute-force technique to gain access to confidential information and personal details of employees, and even financial and security details of companies.

2. Credential Stuffing:

In these kinds of attacks, the cyber attackers use stolen credentials to gain unauthorized access to the users' accounts. This process becomes simpler with automation. Vast databases with low security have compromised credentials and once the attacker gains access, the account is hacked and is used to practice fraudulent activities and transactions, misuse or alter the stored data, and other activities.

3. Phishing:

Phishing is one of the most frequent types of cyberattacks. It is the practice of sending e-mails from a fraud source, disguised as a reliable one to gain confidential and personal information. These e-mails are generally accompanied by a file or a link to an illicit website that tricks the receivers into downloading malware, which reveals their personal information.

Another type of phishing is spear phishing. It is a targeted attack where the criminals thoroughly research their victims and send personalized images, messages, or e-mails that attract the victims' attention. These types of attacks are difficult to recognize. Hence prevention against these attacks becomes tough.

4. Cross-site Scripting:

It is a type of technical attack where the attacker picks out a website with injectable vulnerability, meaning the attacker injects the webserver with a malicious code. It automatically sends the malicious injection to the victim's browser, and as soon as the script is executed the browser sends a cookie that is used by hackers for session hijacking. After that, the cyber attackers monitor the victim's keystrokes to get confidential passwords.

5. Spyware:

Freeware tools are the chief sources of spyware attacks. When the victims download a freeware tool, the spyware attached to it is also downloaded. Attackers use this tool to access the victims' systems and gain confidential information.

6. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS):

DDoS attacks are initiated to overwhelm the network with enormous volumes of unwanted traffic. The traffic exhausts the bandwidth connectivity, making it impossible to respond to basic security requests. Generally, a network of botnets is used to initiate DDoS attacks.

7. Man in the Middle:

A wide and unprotected wi-fi connection is used to carry out a man-in-the-middle attack. When free wi-fi is offered to customers in hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, and other public places, an attacker uses the network to gain access to the victims' sessions.