Top 5 Information Security threats in 2020

1.Malware: 

Malware is a broader name than can be given to a number of malicious software variants, including viruses, worms, trojans, ransomware, and spyware. From the above types, viruses are the most dangerous and quickly spreading, it acts as a biological virus and spreading through computer networks while capturing, encoding, or destroying valuable information. They usually spread through executable files and move via portable devices such as pen drives, portable hard drives. 

Worms are another malware type that initiates in one machine and quickly spread through an entire network. Because of its nature, it is called worms. Spywares hide in computer systems or networks and monitor the moves of the users to collect useful information to do a serious crime. As an example, cyber crooks can use Spyware to gather credit card information of users and use them to do their transactions.

Trojan type malware programs act like legitimate software in someone’s computer. It creates vulnerabilities of a network or computer system to make other malware and threats to enter the network to do damages. Ransomware is another malware type that can do large damage to an organization's reputation by locking down the network to avoid entries of the users.

2. Phishing :

Phishing is a social engineering attack that steals user data like login credentials and credit card numbers. Normally, in Phishing done approaching via email, text message as a trusted party. Then It gives access to links and gets a click on them by the users. Then a malicious program can run on the machine and after installation, it can monitor sensitive information.

3. State-Sponsored attacks  :

State-Sponsored attackers are making a profit by trading the individual’s or corporate’s or entire nations’ data with other parties who are willing to pay a large amount of money for their competitor’s confidential information. Many attacks target the government running industries to do maximum damage to the government’s reputation. But private-sector organizations are also at risk. Sometimes these attacks are done using other countries’ funding.

Cloud Vulnerabilities

With the intense usage of cloud technologies, they are exposed to cyber threats. There can be many threats including hijacking, Denial of Service (DOS), or Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. 

4. Cyber Hijacking :

Hijacking is mainly done in an organizational environment. The attackers mainly take control of the communication. While the two parties are communicating, hijacker takes the control of the channel by intercepting messages in a public key exchange. Then they retransmit the messages substituting their own public key for requesting one. So, the two parties still think that there is no problem in communication. The attacker uses a program that appears to be the server to the client and appears to be the client to the server.

5.DOS :

Denial of Service is a type of attack that blocks the accessing to a network or a machine for its intended users. DOS attack is usually done by flooding the servers by sending a large number of requests to cause large traffic. Therefore, if there is no proper firewall to hold the traffic, the system could crash. The legitimate customers, employees of the organization may not get a chance to access the website or any other resource because of a DOS attack. A DDOS attack is more complicated than a DOS attack. When a system is damaged by a DDOS, it is rarely recovered back to the original state. The slave computers are used by attackers to send traffic. The security teams face difficulty to identify the attackers’ IP address specifically when several machines are involved in the attack.
 

References:

https://www.comparitech.com/net-admin/dos-vs-ddos-attacks-differences-prevention/#:~:text=A%20DoS%20attack%20is%20a,but%20not%20all%20DoS%20%3D%20DDoS.

https://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/hijacking

https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-is-a-denial-of-service-attack-dos#:~:text=A%20Denial%2Dof%2DService%20(,information%20that%20triggers%20a%20crash.