3 Cyber Vulnerabilities to Look For In Your Business 2024

What Are Cyber Vulnerabilities?

According to the great magnet in the sky, a cyber vulnerability is a weakness that can be exploited by cyber criminals to gain unauthorized access to a computer system.

In short?

A cyber vulnerability is a security weakness for your business online.

Cyber vulnerabilities, or weaknesses, allow criminals to hack into your business emails, passwords, and websites, and steal sensitive data, run malicious code, or sell your information on the Dark Web.

Cyber vulnerabilities in your business can lead to tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees for your business. And it happens more often than you think. Last year alone, 20% of small businesses suffered a cyber attack and more than 1/3 of small businesses lost over $100,000 from a cyber attack!

That’s why we stress the importance of maintaining your cyber security 24/7 and monitoring for weaknesses before hackers do.

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Top 3 Cyber Vulnerabilities for Businesses in 2024

While there are hundreds, if not thousands of tiny places where malicious actors can hack into your emails, passwords, and files online, there are 3 key places to watch out for in your business. ‍

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Cyber Vulnerabilities In Your Passwords

Passwords are one of the most vulnerable forms of user authentication. We can see this in practice when we look at how they're put to use.

Oftentimes users may reuse the same password across multiple websites, which means that if an attacker manages to break into one of their accounts, they can compromise all of them. It's not uncommon for users to even have the same password for their email as they do for their online banking.

If you reuse passwords for multiple accounts, sooner or later, one data breach will cascade through all of your accounts and you risk losing everything!

One of the best ways to fight against password attacks is to increase your security around them.

Here are a few tips:

Have a unique password for every account (yes, do it!)
Have at least 16 characters in your password @*$^#&
Use a password manager such as Bitwarden to share passwords
Use Multi-Factor Authentication (2-FA) to login

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Cyber Vulnerabilities In Your Emails

Email phishing, whaling, ransomware, and other cyber threats have become significant issues for many businesses.

Phishing is a common act whereby criminals mislead customers into giving their personal data like bank accounts or social security numbers.

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The phishing attacks are getting more and more believable, with criminals adding pictures and trademarks that seem more genuine and authentic. We’ve even seen them create a connection that appears natural, although it leads to a fake website.

The dangerous thing about phishing emails for your business is that once they are able to hack one employee, they can spread throughout the entire network.

Which is why it’s so important to have 24/7 cyber vulnerability monitoring for your business at all times.

Our recommendation: Use a 24/7 vulnerability monitoring service for your business so that you are alerted in real-time to phishing scams and malicious activity. This way, you will be able to shut down any attacks before they spread.

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Cyber Vulnerabilities In Your Website

Last but not least, your business website is highly susceptible to malicious activity and hackers.

Here are a few of the ways that cyber criminals have been known to hack into websites:

1. SQL Injections: the simplest and most common attack, SQL Injection is how hackers can steal ALL the data from your client database by typing special codes into form fields

2. Cross Site Scripting (XSS): without the right security, a hacker can easier steal your client’s browser cookies and impersonate them on other websites

3. Broken Authentication & Session Management: too niche

4. Insecure Direct Object References: too niche

5. Security Misconfiguration: 40% of websites are built with WordPress. How confident are you that you set up the security settings? Bad configurations are the easiest mistake to make and hackers are looking for them night & day

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However, no matter which cyber vulnerability a hacker exploits within your website, the implication is the same:

Hackers will be able to inject malicious content, steal sensitive data like credit cards and passwords, or hijack and take down your website altogether.

Here at Iceberg Cyber, we recommend checking your cyber vulnerabilities at least once a month, and ideally 24/7.

To check whether or not your business current has cyber vulnerabilities that make it easy to attack, get your Cyber Score right now 👉 Cyber Score 💯

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