It was 4:00 in the morning, May 20, 2021. Matthew Day, CIO of Langs Building Supplies (Langs) was excited for a long-anticipated holiday after 14 months of lockdown due to COVID-19. His wife was thrilled. His friends, ecstatic. But the day took an unexpected turn. Instead of waking up delighted to leave for his getaway, Day woke up to every CIO’s worst nightmare, the dreaded phone call: “We’ve been hacked.”

Looking back at the past year, there have been some downright spooky trends facing cyber security professionals. Ransomware attacks have skyrocketed, impacting organizations from healthcare to critical infrastructure to the suppliers of MSP suppliers and everyone in between. APT crews and criminal gangs have taken advantage of the pandemic that pushed everyone to remote work, making 2020/2021 the year that bad cybersecurity preparedness came home to roost.

Alan is one of the senior officers of a financial bank in Texas. Alan was looking to buy a Halloween costume and got an email about a sale happening at a store near his neighborhood. He clicked on the email to learn more about the offer. In a few hours, his computer, which had critical high-profile customer files and details got infected by ransomware.

A few hours ago, an npm package with more than 7 million weekly downloads was compromised. It appears an ATO (account takeover) occurred in which the author’s account was hijacked either due to a password leakage or a brute force attempt (GitHub discussion).

The US Government has issued an alert to organisations about the threat posed by the BlackMatter ransomware group. The government’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (better known as CISA) issued the advisory earlier this week, following a series of BlackMatter ransomware attacks since July 2021 targeting US critical infrastructure, including two American organisations working in the food and agriculture sector.

As cybercrime rises, businesses need to erect defenses against attacks in all their operations. Supply chains are particularly vulnerable, with cyberattacks against them increasing 42% in Q1 2021, affecting 7 million people’s data. Supply chains make ideal targets for cybercriminals since they hold sensitive data, often have large attack surfaces and are mostly unprotected. As such, they should be a focus for businesses’ cybersecurity efforts.

The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack is potentially one of the worst cyberattacks to have happened this decade. A hacker group known as DarkSide stole nearly 100GB of data from the Colonial Pipeline servers before locking them down and demanding a ransom. Colonial Pipeline, with the assistance of FBI, paid around 5 million dollars to recover its systems. And it didn’t stop there.

As we’ve all learned, often the hard way, amazing tech has introduced not-so-amazing risks: viruses, hacks, and leaks, to name a few. A data breach or cyber attack can happen at any moment, to individuals or businesses of any size – and attackers do not discriminate.

When we think about cyberattacks and malicious hackers, we often think in terms of our own personal lives and our own organizations. In my experience in cybersecurity, I often hear people say “Why would hackers target me?

The cyberworld has witnessed and defended against several forms of attacks. Some of the most common ones known to disrupt a network include credential stealing, malware installations, worms and viruses, and insider threats. In order to execute these attacks successfully, attackers often use different tools and techniques. For instance, in a ransomware attack, an attacker may install malicious software to encrypt all the files and folders in your network and demand a ransom to recover the files.