Massachusetts Businesses Need to Prepare for 2023’s Cybersecurity Trends

Cybercrime has grown rapidly over the last several years. We’ve seen more and more businesses get hit by crippling ransomware, data breaches, and other types of attacks. End-users are inundated with common, but deadly phishing attacks and other threats that are so easy to fall for, even IT experts could get tricked. Let’s look at these trends for 2023, and how your business can prepare for them.

Your Users are the Target, Your Business is the Victim

We started to really see this emerge during the pandemic. With so many people shifting their environment and starting to work from home, cybercriminals took advantage of this and put their focus on the end users. They took advantage of the chaos, and used urgency to pressure users into acting without thinking.

Some of the common tactics being used were legitimate-looking emails from cloud services like Google Drive, Microsoft, and Zoom, which would either trick users into downloading malware or submitting sensitive information.

With a lot of businesses still offering remote or hybrid operations, these types of tactics are still commonplace, and cybercriminals have continued to hone them to improve their effectiveness.

They aren’t totally reliant on workers being out of the office either—many businesses often do have some level of cybersecurity measures in place, but a lot of these tactics supersede them by using your staff. 

The solution, other than making sure your business has some of the essential network security stuff out of the way, is training. Every single employee in your organization needs to be trained to be aware of potential threats, learn how to identify them, and be tested on how to handle them. We can help provide training programs that are effective at teaching even the most disinterested employees to reduce the threat of cyberattacks that target them directly.

Ransomware Isn’t Going to Slow Down

Last year, we talked about how cybercriminals treat their trade like a business. To sum it up, it’s all about optimizing their efforts to get the best return. In other words, attacks are only going to get more effective and more lucrative for the cybercriminal. Yes, there are always going to be phishing attacks and scams that are laughably ridiculous, but for every dozen of those, there are going to be a few very convincing, extremely honed-in threats that are easy to miss.

Ransomware attacks work like this: a computer that is infected with ransomware will encrypt every file it can, which essentially locks you out of accessing almost all of your data. The files may as well be gone forever. The only way to “fix” the attack is by paying a ransom, and they usually want it in Bitcoin, so you can’t just work it out with your bank after the fact. The ransom could be a couple hundred dollars to several thousands of dollars. There’s no guarantee that paying the ransom will even work, and usually if criminals can get ransomware on your network, they can also do a lot of other damage. Modern variants of ransomware could rapidly spread across an entire business network, spread to email contacts, or threaten to not only lock down your data, but to leak it all online.

Most businesses haven’t taken the proper steps to prevent or mitigate these types of attacks. Here’s the thing—ransomware attacks are expensive. It’s not just about paying the ransom, and you shouldn’t ever find yourself in a position where you have to pay the ransom in the first place. 

The real costs come in the form of downtime and PR. When ransomware strikes, work comes to a screeching halt. You might have some departments that can struggle along, but for most businesses, ransomware can cripple 80 to 100 percent of your workforce, and it can take several days to get back to normal, depending on how prepared you are. If customer data is involved, then you need to issue statements and communicate to those that are affected, and that can do serious damage to your reputation even if you do everything quickly and respectfully. 

Across the globe, there were over 236 million ransomware attacks during the first half of 2022. This type of threat has been on the rise for the last several years and it’s not going to slow down anytime soon.

The key to preventing ransomware comes in two equal parts—training like we mentioned above, and hardened IT security featuring active security monitoring and modern threat protection.

The Cloud Isn’t Immune to Attacks

Often enough, smaller businesses forgo expensive in-house servers to manage and store their files and instead utilize cloud services like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. In fact, the vast majority of organizations these days rely on some level of cloud computing whether they realize it or not. If your data for a particular application or service is stored online, that’s the cloud.

The use of cloud services has been growing steadily since its inception, and for good reason. It generally costs less while getting your users more access and more tools, and generally the cloud has been more secure overall since cloud vendors tend to have huge security budgets where smaller businesses don’t. 

That doesn’t mean you can trust your entire business to any particular cloud service and assume there are no risks. Major corporations, including cloud service providers, can be breached. It’s much more rare.

As far as we know, services like Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive haven’t experienced a major data breach, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Moreover, cybercriminals know that millions of users use these services every day, so they are using tricks to exploit people through the use of these tools, with phishing attacks and other types of threats.

On top of that, a mismanaged implementation of any particular cloud service could leave a business vulnerable. If proper security measures, access control, two-factor authentication, and other measures weren’t implemented, your data is only as protected as the weakest password that can access it.

Don’t Put Your Business at Risk

Cybersecurity has become much more complicated over the last few years, but good cybersecurity isn’t unobtainable for small businesses. We’ve been helping businesses of all sizes across Massachusetts and the greater New England area utilize modern technology to grow and thrive, get more done with less, and meet strict cybersecurity compliance standards, and we can help protect your business from the threats that are out there.

Getting started is easy and absolutely risk-free. Just give us a call at (774) 213-9701 to get started.