Effective cybersecurity planning starts by having a good understanding of your enemy’s( hackers) intentions and Cybersecurity Insiders brings to you the 6 specific areas of data that are considered as gold mines for cyber crooks. The trick is that if you know what the gold is, you will come up with a better plan to protect it.
Banking credentials- Let’s think from a hacker’s perspective- No cybercrook in this materialistic world will hesitate to figure out a company’s banking credentials in order to swindle money from the bank accounts. By impersonating an authorized user of the account, money from a payroll account or a current account can be easily drained. What if the said incident takes place before the night of the usual payroll processing?
Critical Info about customers, vendors, and staff- Usually cyber thieves will be super-interested in stealing sensitive info like credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other data. At the same time, they will try to infiltrate into a corporate network to siphon info about customers, vendors, and staff as it can be sold from $10 to $300 per record in the dark world depending on the data value.
Trade secrets- Usually, such type of data steal happens in the corporate world of technology where companies, hacking groups funded by state actors, governments or enemies will be interested in accessing such info to stay ahead in the competition or with some malevolent motives. Secret formulas, software codes, design specs, and well-defined processes can prove as valuable info to hackers. So, are all your business ideas well guarded against such thefts?
Email data- Getting access to an individual’s email account– especially who holds a top position in a federal agency can prove valuable to cybercriminals as such data can fetch them $1200 to $30,000 depending on the person whose account credentials have been stolen. Furthermore, hackers are ready to pay $8 each for credentials of an iTunes account, $6 for accounts related to FedEx, Continental.com and United.com and $ for Groupon.com account. Also if the hacker can get access to the login credentials of active Facebook and Twitter accounts, then they can get paid between $3 to $4 each.
Hitting the business partners- Suppose a smaller company does business with a larger company and so has access to some kind of passwords and accounts due to the work relationship. Then cybercriminals will be interested in breaking into the network of the small company and then will try to find their way into the network of the bigger company. All such activity is done by infecting the small company website with malware and then attacking the larger company network with the available credentials-known as a watering hole attack.
Reputation damage- We have seen and heard a lot of examples about the reputational damage done to SMBs when they are hit by a cyber attack. But do you know that a big company like Yahoo had to give a $380 million discount to its buyer i.e Verizon when the telecom company wanted to acquire it…? Such is the reputation damage incurred from a cyber attack.
