Cybercrime is a relevant threat any time of year, but especially during the holidays. The FBI recently issued a warning about rising ransomware attacks on holidays and weekends, a trend that is far from new but growing. As cybercrime continues to rise, holiday cybersecurity needs to improve. Many of the largest cyberattacks, including the Colonial Pipeline attack, have happened over various holidays. Smaller attacks tend to increase around these times of the year, too. Here are six reasons why.

Cyber threats and attacks are a growing issue for businesses because the amount of vulnerabilities has increased. The volume of global malware has risen 58% annually, and the volume of spam has risen by more than one-third in the past 12 months. These issues have made it more difficult for employees to focus on what they need to do. Zero-day attacks in cyber security are one such challenge for security teams around the world.

In 2020, just under half the UK workforce worked from home at least some of the time, according to the Office of National Statistics. In the United States, a survey by Upwork found that over a quarter of professionals expect to work fully remotely within the next five years. Working from home has been propelled into the mainstream by the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the resulting lockdowns and restrictions on traveling to work.

Several of the digital twin technologies out there have grown fast in only a few years. Picture establishing a virtual model of IT infrastructure where one can identify loopholes, create attack scenarios, and prevent catastrophic attacks before the system is officially put in place. Using digital twins, it's no longer a silly idea for organizations to follow. Let's get knowledge of Digital Twin technology and how it can help to assess the loopholes in your security posture.

Hackers are highly trained cybercriminals with access to resources capable of compromising a system in an organization without being detected. And malwareless attacks – where cybercriminals access critical business networks without malware – are on the rise.

Last year, as most people were stuck at home, many of us became even more dependent on e-commerce sites than we were already. Unfortunately, that includes cybercriminals too. In 2020, scams targeting the checkout forms of online retailers rose by 20%, according to reports.

An enumeration attack is when cybercriminals use brute-force methods to check if certain data exists on a web server database. For simple enumeration attacks, this data could include usernames and passwords. More sophisticated attacks could uncover hostnames, SNMP, and DNS details, and even confirm poor network setting configurations. Every web application module that communicates with a user database could potentially become an enumeration attack vector if left unsecured.

In Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) a system or network is flooded with online traffic from multiple sources in an attempt to make it unavailable. Cybercriminals take advantage of protocol or DNS server vulnerabilities that they exploit to launch attacks. Moreover, in larger scale attacks, they may use malware that infects thousands of hosts that target the victim to block it, all of them with different IP addresses, which is known as a botnet.

On Saturday November 13th, hundreds of thousands of recipients received an email from the FBI with the subject line of “Urgent: Threat actor in systems.” Thankfully for the recipients, it turned out the threat described in these emails wasn’t real as, unfortunately, the FBI had suffered an external email breach resulting in fake warning messages being sent out.

The SolarWinds attack in late 2020 exposed the data of more than 18,000 businesses and governmental departments – many of which are gatekeepers for the country’s most vital infrastructure. While attacks against the software supply chain aren’t new, they are increasing exponentially.