The beginning of 2020 and COVID gave birth to something more sinister for businesses as hackers and cybercriminals sought innovative ways to dismantle business websites. One of the reasons for this was the number of times people went online to do transactions through websites, which became an opportunity for hackers to deploy virus attacks. According to the FBI (Foreign Branch of Investigation), there has been an almost fourfold increase in cybersecurity complaints, whereas the losses amount to an alarming USD 1 trillion only because of cybercrime.
In such a scenario where different kinds of online threats are growing, awareness of these threats and resilience are the two key counters to stop and prevent these attacks from harming your business website. Since cyber threats are getting more sophisticated and intense with more remote working levels and dependencies on digital technologies, it becomes important for us to understand and know a bit more about them so that we can prevent them from affecting us.
With this article, we seek to do just that. In this article, we will talk about the top 5 online security threats that can affect you this year and what you as a provider of reseller hosting packages can do to contain and mitigate them. So, if you want to protect the interests of your clients and help them keep their websites and your own website secure, understand and be aware of the following threats-
1. Social Engineering Attacks
Social engineering attacks are those wherein non-technical strategies are deployed by hackers to penetrate systems. They often rely on human interactions and deceiving people into breaching standard security practices. Common tactics involved are phishing wherein, fake information is disguised as legitimate, and highly targeted attacks are orchestrated to gain the trust of people. Because of this deception, people are likely to fall prey to such attacks and give out important credentials that can jeopardize their business. Usually, users are made to complete important tasks pertaining to their profiles which makes them fall into the trap.
In order to prevent this, businesses must train their employees about the occurrence of such attacks and show them instances with examples. If you are running your own reseller hosting business and have employees, you can train your employees about the same and how phishing through emails takes place. Also, network detection and response paired with SIEM technologies can help you identify when and where malware entered the network. With this counter-tactics, you can boost security and overall awareness of cyber threats.
2. DDoS Attacks
Increasing traffic is not the only thing that is worrying cyber security personnel in hosting companies. It is also the amount of DDoS attacks that keep growing especially when hackers use AI to perform these attacks. DDoS attacks can be curbed if the reseller hosting provider has a firm strategy in place with detection software or monitoring tools and platforms. Since DDoS attacks don’t cost much there is an increase in the supply of tools and personnel that can help mitigate them. Apart from deploying these at your end, you as a reseller hosting facilitator can also find tactics, techniques, and procedures to control DDoS attacks with AI-based cybersecurity that helps combat these attacks and malware.
3. Ransomware
Ransomware is a data encryption program that requires you to release payment in exchange for accessing files you once had easy access to. It restricts computer access to your files by displaying messages and notifications that literally demand a large sum to be paid. Lockscreen and encryption messages are two kinds of ransomware messages that you are most likely to encounter. As a reseller, if you ever encounter this, the best way you can tackle these attacks is by taking a constant backup of your files and system. So, when you get your hosting as a reseller, ask the provider if they have cloud backups or such a mechanism in place so that in case this attack takes place, you have the files stored and saved somewhere safe.
4. Third-party software
Unfortunate, but true, that tech, hosting firms, or any online business integrates third-party software to up their performances but they are likely to fall prey to the virus attacks. According to Verizon, 43% of third-party apps were prey to data breaches, and 80% of worldwide organizations experienced a cybersecurity breach originating from a vulnerability that existed in their third-party vendor’s ecosystem.
Cybercriminals use these apps and exploit system admin tools as gateways to enter a business website’s premises. As IT systems become increasingly interconnected, it becomes difficult to spot the exact entry point of these attacks, adding more to the confusion. If these attacks were to be stopped, your tools need to be equipped with antivirus software that sends notifications to you when there are any attacks happening or any discrepancies can be seen through third-party software. Also, regularly update your software whenever a new version is available and purchase a licensed version only to avoid any mishaps.
5. Malware
When you say malware, you are talking about a large pool of viruses that includes ransomware, spyware, worms, trojans, etc. But to simplify, malware is short for malicious software, where the malware accesses sensitive data and keeps on duplicating it i.e. new malware gets created constantly. Its source is emails and quickly spreads to other parts of your system, only to corrupt files, send spam, disable security settings, and steal data from your computer.
One of the ways it can be prevented is by not opening emails from unknown entities or those outside your mailing list or contacts. Basic antivirus from decent providers can also do the job that uses multi-layered security, but the best is to avoid emails and let them go into a junk folder which you can directly clean by deleting the mails together.
Conclusion
There are other threats too to your hosting business and website such as those coming from cloud computing vulnerabilities, from lack of instrumentation and monitoring cycles in the tools, exposure to unknown vulnerabilities from new technologies, etc. But also understand that they are few and far in nature and there are some tactics in place to prevent them. The ones that are mentioned are the most common ones and can happen to any hosting business and need to be addressed because it can rot the whole ecosystem immediately.
We hope that you have understood the importance of this article and will take precautionary measures based on what we discussed right now. If you have doubts, queries, or any recommendations, please share them with us in the comments section below. Till then, stay safe and keep your hosting business and website safe and healthy.
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