Cybercrime has emerged as an unprecedented and ever-increasing threat to every company worldwide, threatening their bottom lines with financial loss estimated to reach $6 Trillion by 2021 – surpassing even drug trade profits in terms of profitability. Cyber attacks are attacks by criminals to breach other computers, networks, or information systems. Such breaches may involve the theft or loss of sensitive data; disabled computers; or incurring significant financial loss. Cybercriminals target individuals, businesses, and even government operations alike. Hackers typically attack these targets with the aim of gaining access to sensitive or valuable materials such as customer data, payment details, or intellectual property that is kept secure within an organization – with devastating expenses associated with such damages incurred as a result of these types of attacks.
How Could a Cyber Attack Impact Your Business?
Assuming enterprise-grade security for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) may seem intimidating, it is vital that SMBs be vigilant against threats affecting them from cybersecurity threats such as IBM’s 2019 Cost of Data Breach Report indicating an average SMB breach costs anywhere between $120,000 to $1.4 Million; many SMBs cannot bear such significant financial burden.
Pennyrile Technologies reported that on average, SMBs spend 5-20% of their IT budget on security – this means if a budget totaling $5,000 goes toward IT, $250-1000 must go toward security costs. Although these numbers might seem high at first, in modern business security expenses act much like insurance policy premiums do – think of security costs like insurance for your business! Here is an example of an active cyber attack:
GoDaddy announced on November 17th of a data breach that could impact up to 1.2 million customers when an unauthorized third party gained entry to their Managed WordPress hosting environment. WordPress is a widely-used content management system used by millions of website designers worldwide and this hack could affect all those using its CMS platform.
On November 6, GoDaddy disclosed an unauthorized third party had gained entry to their system around September, three months before becoming aware of any security breach. Of the 1.2 million affected, their email addresses and customer numbers were exposed, as were active customers’ sFTP credentials and login information for WordPress databases, which store all their content. Some SSL private keys were also exposed allowing an attacker to impersonate customers’ websites or services; GoDaddy stated these customers may become more susceptible to “phishing attacks”, which will be explored further down this post.
GoDaddy boasts more than 20 million worldwide customers. A GoDaddy representative, Dan Race, declined to provide details regarding any security breach due to an ongoing investigation within the company.
Types of Cyber Attacks
Your business could become vulnerable to cyber-attacks without appropriate security measures being in place.
Passive and active attacks should both be closely monitored; passive ones could potentially target vital customer data, payment details or intellectual property while active attacks seek to compromise system integrity, confidentiality and availability by targeting key resources within it.
- Phishing – These forms of web attacks aim to trick users into providing sensitive data such as passwords, credit card details and account numbers so they can download corrupted files that could contain viruses on their device. Phishing has also increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to CrowdStrike‘s reports, one of the primary methods employed during attacks in 2020 involved impersonating medical providers who claim they can treat COVID-19 and government organizations that claimed they possess essential public health data that must be shared.
- Malware – (malicious software or code) refers to any piece of software or code created with malicious intent aimed at damaging or corrupting computer, network or server resources.
- Ransomware – Ransomware attacks, trojans, spyware viruses worms keyloggers bots cryptojacking attacks often use malware as their attack vector. Colonial Pipeline, a fuel provider serving communities in southeastern United States was hit with a ransomware attack from DarkSide, an underground hacking group. They paid their ransom fee of $4.4 billion but their network continued operating but at reduced speeds.
- Denial-of-Service (DoS) & Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks
A DoS attack is an intentional assault designed to flood networks with false requests in order to disrupt business operations, leaving users unable to send and receive email, access their websites/accounts or complete basic tasks like sending/receiving email. While such attacks do not usually require ransom payments or cause data loss, they still cost organizations time, money, and resources in order to return to normal operations following such an assault.
DoS and DDoS attacks differ by their source; while DoS originates from one system at once, DDoS can come from multiple simultaneously, making them much harder and quicker to stop than DoS. - Man-in-the-middle (MITM) Attacks – An MITM attack refers to any form of unlawful eavesdropping between network users and web applications in order to illegally collect personal information, such as passwords or billing details that allows an attacker to pose as another individual, change login credentials, complete illegal transactions or transfer funds illegally.
How Do We Protect Your Assets?
ZatroX Studio can ensure your security by including enterprise-grade protection as a part of our comprehensive web development and hosting package, rather than charging extra money for it as an add-on service.
Our automated security system offers both preventive measures and cures to threats and attacks across all levels of server, network, application service and file-system security. Utilizing intrusion prevention/detection technologies like WAF (web application firewall), real-time antivirus protection and network firewall with patch management modules – it instantly detects, fixes and protects against threats encountered by any web hosting service, thus assuring the protection of your assets at all times.
Some key features included in our security arsenal:
- HTTP/3 or QUIC.cloud – Used to connect users to websites using the next generation of connectivity.
- Network Layer Protection – This layer consists of a Web-Application Firewall combined with WebShield and Network Firewall that together protect against web attacks using HTTP/HTTPS traffic as regular traffic or from CDN or Proxy sources.
- WebShield – WebShield protects against CDN and Proxy traffic by identifying an attacker’s real IP addresses and differentiating these from those belonging to legitimate users.
- CAPTCHA and Splash Screen – To safeguard against malicious activity and ensure valid customers can reach your website without draining your hosting resources, an advanced Captcha system and Splash Screen should be utilized to halt malicious behavior and ensure valid customers can reach it without being blocked out by it.
- Application Service Level Proactive Defense – Malicious code can often remain undetected, yet with our proactive defense technology detecting and blocking malicious execution flows in runtime is easily possible. By analyzing PHP script’s behavior it prevents it from harming any server resources in anyway.
- File System Level Antivirus – Real-time file scanners monitor file input and output operations, providing instant protection via access to scanners at every level running either automatically or manually. Cand Control Panel Integration – Instant protection via access to scanners running both automatically and manually is offered instantly through control panel integration.
- Control Panel Integration – This allows for instant protection by giving you access to scanners on every level, running both automatically or manually.
- Herd Immunity – Servers can benefit from collective herd immunity by sharing data in real-time across servers. When an attacker is detected, we act swiftly to proactively block malicious activity on all servers involved.
- Customizable Central Dashboard – This dashboard shows all security events in real-time, allows for filtering and event selection based on various parameters, details of incidents reviewed by investigators, access to white list/blacklist management features, view settings/reports etc. and much more.
Why Choose ZatroX Studio for your Business Website Hosting?
With our security software in place, we are able to see everything necessary to keep your website and business secure. When hackers attempt to breach any of our clients’ systems, we receive notifications. Furthermore, our system detects threats daily, some more severe than others; regardless, they’re all detected before becoming an issue for you and we use this information about what threats are approaching to optimize its integrity and protect against further cyber-attacks.
Once we become your partners, it will be our mission to proactively build, manage, and protect the cyber security of your business. We remain up-to-date with cutting edge cyber security innovations so your company is always one step ahead of cyber attackers or competitors.
Schedule your free demo now to discover more ways that we can safeguard the digital assets of your business and elevate its brand.
