Today almost every aspect of our life has moved online.
And we can be quite happy about it because you no longer need to waste a whole hour to commute to work, you don’t need to go to the bank to make a deposit or you don’t need to go to a shopping center to buy something, you also don’t have the need to go to school as you already have it at your desk at home. All of these things you have already at home, namely online.
And many more things of our daily and not daily life have moved online. We started to enjoy more flexible and fast communication with the whole world and you just can’t count them all how many incredible perks we’ve got today.
Though reality comes by itself. In many corners of this new cyber world, various inferior entities are waiting and preying. That’s why we present you with the most scariest online threats you can encounter there and should be aware of:
Overtaken IoT devices
Internet of things devices are known to be particularly vulnerable to online cyber threats because of their weak or hard-coded passwords.
Threat actors can sometimes easily look up their passwords on the internet; that’s why specialists urgently recommend users keep their IoT devices software regularly updated and change any default password on any IoT device.
IP cameras, routers, digital video recorders, and many other IoT devices can easily get exposed to the internet and as a result put you in danger.
If anything from various kinds of malware can use the internet to spread and do its malicious actions then imagine the consequences of a data breach on a home network consisting not only of your IoT devices, but also computer, mobile, and laptops.
Some malware is particularly keen on exploiting vulnerabilities in IoT devices such as spyware, trojans, ransomware, etc to use such devices resources and conduct via them designated malicious actions.
One example of IoT device exploits is the creation of a botnet usually to target other users with DoS attacks.
Having some of your important passwords leaked
It might not be scary if your Instagram password from 2010 has been leaked but your leaked bank account password definitely should make you worry.
And if you happen to have one of your passwords leaked it’s out of the question that it needs to be immediately recharged.
Try to use for each important account a unique, strong, and complex password that won’t be easily guessed by anyone encroaching on your privacy.
We know sometimes it’s hard to remember each one of them, especially nowadays that you can have up to fifty different accounts. The solution could be using a password manager that can help you with securing all your important passwords.
Phishing scams
Phishing has always been some of the most common types of scam. Threat actors try various techniques to lure you to click their malicious attachment. But there’s also one kind of phishing that doesn’t fall behind in popularity among other scam techniques.
Threat actors create fake websites to make potential victims enter their valuable information. The information stolen in such a way may vary from banking account credentials to your login credentials to other sites.
With the wide spread of today’s photoshopping technologies it doesn’t make it that hard for threat actors to make up perfect spots for scams.
That’s why specialists recommend before entering any data onto a website first check if you are at a legitimate one. To do this simply look up its URL address and see whether it’s the same as you know the official one should have.
Denial of Service
This type of online cyber attack occurs when threat actors create floods of requests at a targeted computer or network with the help of another controlled computer. The amount of such malicious requests can rise so high that the victim’s infrastructure can’t respond to all the requests and simply goes off.
The similar kind of the same attack is DDoS where threat actors would use a whole network for attack. DoS attacks usually are meant to tear apart “handshake” connections and thus carry out DoS.
In other cases when a network is disabled threat actors will go on launching other attacks. Sometimes the number of exploits in such attacks can rise to millions of bots. Such huge botnets can be found in different locations and are hard to trace.
Man in the Middle
One of the common attacks people face when using unsecure public wifi connection. In this kind of an attack threat actors can insert themselves between victim and website and redirect traffic so that they see what data victim is exchanging with it.
In other cases using compromised connection threat actors can even install some malware onto your device. Typically correspondents won’t even know that there’s a third party in a channel.
This kind of an attack can happen to users of various e-commerce sites, financial applications, SaaS businesses and similar websites where logging is required. Usual goal of such an attack is to steal sensitive information like credit card numbers, account details or login credentials.
Ransomware
The real king of today’s cybercriminal landscape. Ransomware constantly makes headlines on the news with ever increasing ransom demands which sometimes can unbelievably skyrocket.
Though these days most ransomware attacks occur on big companies and enterprises individuals sometimes suffer no less damage. The stealthy malware encrypts data and holds it hostage until payment is done.
In some cases ransomware criminals employ double extortion technique and sometimes it can be even triple extortion technique. Double extortion technique means in addition to encryption and ransom demand also to steal data and threaten victims with publishing it on the internet. I advise you to study malware VS ransomware: what is the difference?
These additional actions are meant to have another pull on the victim’s willingness to pay. Another triple extortion technique involves also those whose data has been compromised in an attack. Criminals threaten them with publishing stolen data and so creating a third pull for the company or enterprise to pay the ransom.
