What Is a Cyber Attack: How to Secure Your Network
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Once something only large enterprises had to deal with, cyber attacks are on the rise across industries and business sizes.
Understanding the different types of cyber attacks and how to defend against them is no longer optional; it’s essential to the survival of any modern business. When a cyber attack, meaning any infiltration of a computer system, succeeds, it doesn’t just mean stolen files or a short period of downtime for the targeted company. It could mean millions of dollars in mitigation costs, legal and regulatory ramifications as well.
What is a Cyber Attack?
A cyber attack is an attempt to gain unauthorized access to computer networks, systems or data with malicious intent. What motivates an attacker can vary as widely as the businesses they target, from simple financial gain to corporate espionage, general sabotage or simply wanting to wreak havoc with a company’s systems and customers.
The methods used to exploit systems can also vary widely. Untargeted attacks, like phishing, cast a wide net to catch a user off guard. More targeted attacks, such as code injection or spoofing, are intended to damage the targeted organization.
What Happens if There is a Cyber Attack?
The impact of a cyber attack can be long-lasting and far-ranging. In the short term, the main consequences include:
- Data breaches that expose sensitive business and customer information
- System downtime that prevents normal business operations
- Financial losses from disrupted services and recovery efforts
- Regulatory blowback and potential fines
- Potential ransomware demands to reinstate system access
An example of the impact of a cyber attack is the ransomware attack that international shipping company CMA CGM suffered in mid-2020. Due to softer security, the attack targeted servers in a peripheral location rather than at a primary facility. It was a two-tiered assault consisting of a data breach and ransomware. The latter locked employees and customers out of business-critical systems for weeks while the company’s IT teams and outside experts worked to reverse the lockdown and regain access.
How Long Does a Cyber Attack Last?
How long a cyber attack lasts depends on three key factors: the type of attack, when it is first detected and how fast a company can respond with remediation efforts. A simple attack may last only a few minutes, while others may last months or years, including detection lags and recovery time.
In general, business downtime is typically 7-21 days from detection, which can be anywhere from minutes with some distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to a full year for certain types of credential theft attacks. Full remediation may take several months from detection to business as usual.
What are the 3 Types of Cyber Attacks?
Attacks on Confidentiality
These attacks are designed to gain access to restricted or proprietary information, whether customer data, company financial records or confidential intellectual property (IP). Examples of attacks on confidentiality include:
- Phishing tricks users into revealing their credentials
- Spyware quietly monitors user behavior and steals credentials and other information
- Data breaches target customer databases
- Social engineering attacks use human psychology to gain access via the physical world
- Brute force methods are used to gain access via lists of stolen credentials
Attacks on Integrity
This type of attack aims to manipulate or corrupt files to disrupt operations and damage data reliability. These are often larger, more coordinated attacks than the first category and take much longer to recover from. Examples of attacks on integrity include:
- Ransomware can encrypt files while the attackers demand payment to decrypt critical business systems
- Data manipulation attacks alter information with the goal of damaging customer trust
- SQL injection and logic bombs compromise entire databases
Attacks on Availability
The purpose of these attacks is to deny or restrict access to data by its rightful owners. Examples of attacks on availability include:
- Denial-of-service attacks are designed to overwhelm networks and cause them to shut down until DDoS mitigation efforts can be put into effect.
- Ransomware is designed to lock users out of business-critical systems until payment is made to the attackers
- Malware that causes systems to crash on demand
The Impact of Cyber Attacks on Businesses
Financial and Operational Losses
Damage to Reputation
Less often considered is the long-term damage to a brand’s reputation when a data breach leaks customer information. The general public doesn’t need to know the details of an attack to understand that their names, addresses and more are now available to other bad actors, and they will blame the company for this breach in trust.
This, in turn, will affect the organization’s market position as many of those customers will defect to a competitor who has not suffered a breach, causing the impacted business further challenges in rebuilding public trust and regaining lost business.
Long-Term Setbacks
There are other long-term setbacks a company may face in the aftermath of a cyber attack:
- Delayed growth initiatives: an incident can force funds to be redirected from other projects
- Loss of competitive position: Innovation will take a hit, leading to lost market opportunities
- Investment in recovery: These diverted resources could have gone to R&D
- Psychological impact: Employee morale and stakeholder confidence will both drop steeply
Compliance and Regulatory Penalties
Governments and regulatory bodies can impose fines on companies after a data breach if the stolen data relates to protected classes of information. In Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets standards for data protection and what fines can be levied if those standards are not met. In the U.S., the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) does the same for medical data.
Additionally, individuals and groups whose information was stolen in a breach can sue the company responsible. Once a breach is identified and mitigated, additional compliance requirements are often implemented to ensure the same thing does not happen again.
Strategies for Cyber Attack Prevention
The most effective way to protect your business and data from attack is to take a multi-layered, proactive approach by implementing robust security measures before a breach occurs. Some good places to start include:
- Deploying next-generation firewalls with deep packet inspection capabilities
- Establishing strong encryption on your data, both in transit and at rest
- Properly configuring access management and authentication protocols
- Scheduling regular security awareness training sessions for employees
Network Security Best Practices
Beyond the above list of first steps, turn your attention to your overall network security by addressing the following areas:
- Segmenting your network to contain potential breaches before they reach critical systems
- Establishing intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS)
- Conducting regular vulnerability assessments and penetration testing
- Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all user accounts
- Investing in advanced network security like that provided by secure access service edge (SASE) solutions
Role of Managed and Professional Services
Investing in a managed services provider for your network security and cyber attack prevention needs may also be right for your organization. Some key benefits of this model include:
- 24/7 threat monitoring and response
- Access to specialized cybersecurity experts without onboarding costs
- Proactive threat hunting and risk mitigation
- Fast incident detection and response times
- Cost-effective security operations through shared resources
Services like managed software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) and the Envision platform can bring your cybersecurity activities to an enterprise level, without the costs associated with hiring a dedicated security team.
Protect Yourself from Cyber Attacks with GTT
Our comprehensive security solutions include our integrated approach to network security and connectivity, expert monitoring and threat response capabilities and the scalability to grow your security perimeter as you scale business operations.
Our proven track record in enterprise security and seamless integration with existing infrastructure comes with our expert support and consultation services to help you build a safe and secure ecosystem for your proprietary company data. Talk to our experts today to find out how we can help lock down your business network and save you the costs and reputational damage associated with a cyber attack.
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