5 Cybersecurity Challenges Commonly Faced by IT Departments

Cybersecurity challenges are becoming an unavoidable issue for businesses nationwide and around the globe. With reputational and financial costs resulting from data breaches, cybercrime can cause a lot of damage to businesses, especially those that are not prepared beforehand. Even though technology has made it possible for organizations to streamline their operations, it still requires an extensively trained and experienced cybersecurity team to deal with the evergrowing number of cyber threats out there.

But what cybersecurity challenges are commonly faced by IT departments? Here are 5 of them for your consideration.

• Ransomware

Businesses across the country need to work on Cybersecurity Virginia, Washington or Chicago, Cybersecurity consultants have stated time and time again ransomware is not to be taken lightly. In fact, in a report by McAfee Labs in 2017, it was found that this type of malware will continue to be a hindrance for businesses for years to come.

Ransomware prevents users from gaining access to important data and information on their networks or computers until a ‘ransom’ is paid. Even though a payment is made, there is no guarantee that the cybercriminal responsible will undo what is done, and could quite possibly ask for money from their victims.

• IoT

IoT, or the Internet of Things, is becoming increasingly popular due to its massive potential. But what people do not understand is that with so many connected devices, hacking will be a piece of cake.

According to McAfee, an estimated 18 billion connected devices will be in the hands of consumers by 2019. Hacking into said connected devices will not only be easy, but it will encourage hacktivism and ransomware attacks.

Apart from the threat of increased attacks, there is also the issue of privacy seeing how smart devices tend to contain a substantial amount of sensitive information that could be misused. McAfee has gone on record to state that numerous products already being sold have backdoors which can be used cybercriminals for nefarious purposes.

• DDoS Attacks

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks are responsible for bringing down some of the biggest names in the industry in the last couple of years, like BBC and Dyn for instance.

This year will see an increase in the scale and frequency of DDoS attacks by 10 million, as stated by the UK head of cyber risk services at Deloitte, Phil Everson.

• Social Engineering

While cybersecurity measures and technology become more complex, criminals are moving towards social engineering to bypass these systems.

The process involves deceiving and manipulating critical individuals into giving away financial information or any other important data for that matter, most popularly through phishing.

• Insider Threats

Apart from external threats, businesses are faced with internal threats as well.

There is a significant chance that a security issue could arise internally. In fact, it was discovered that 60% of data breaches in 2015 alone were due to insider threats. Out of the 60%, two-thirds of people did what they did with malicious intent, while the remaining incidents were caused by unintended actors. The latter refers to individuals that who unknowingly gave attackers the information they needed, or simply failed to follow standing operating procedures.

The aforementioned challenges are a few of many other challenges faced by IT departments. These are the kind of issues that can’t be dealt with for good, even though the solutions to each problem may seem quite simple. Simply put, there are too many factors for any IT department to control. Even though the best standard operating procedures can be put in place, there is nothing that can be done to remedy the human error.

What businesses and their respective IT departments can do is to go above and beyond the call of duty to educate everyone from the lower to the top tiers of management. Awareness will not exactly solve the problem, but it can reduce the risks of having to deal with cybersecurity challenges.