The Biggest Cyber Threat to Your Disaster Recovery Plan Is Human Error

We hear it all the time. An employee clicks a link they shouldn’t have, and now the organization’s critical data and applications are being held for ransom by dangerous cyber criminals. And it happens more often than you think.

The total damage of cyberattacks reached $6 trillion in 2022, with the average company losing $188,400 to cybercrime in a year. Human error is a huge security risk. According to a study by IBM, 95% of cybersecurity breaches result from human error. If you mitigate human error-related cyber breaches, you can effectively resolve 19 out of 20 cyber breaches. With the amount of damage a cyberattack can wreak, cyber threat intelligence should be a top priority for companies. They must be adamant about preventing human error, which makes it harder for bad actors to infiltrate private company networks.

Who Is Considered a Bad Actor?

Bad actors include anyone who unlawfully infiltrates digital systems for money, politics, or some other malicious intent. — e.g., cybercriminals, unethical hackers, insiders, cyber terrorists, hacktivists, and government-backed hackers.

The 5 Most Common Cyberattacks

While the top three cyber threats are malware attacks, phishing, and password attacks, bad actors have many others and keep inventing more.

These are the most common cyberattacks:

1. Malware refers to malicious software viruses, such as worms, spyware, ransomware, adware, and trojans.
2. Phishing is a type of social engineering attack where attackers impersonate trusted contacts and send victims fake emails. Unaware, the victims open the email and click on a malicious link or open an attachment. The bad actors gain access to confidential information and account credentials. They can also install malware.
3. Password attacks are where hackers crack passwords with various programs and cracking tools like Aircrack, Cain, Abel, John the Ripper, or Hashcat to gain access to confidential information and account credentials.
4. Mis-delivery of information is when something is sent to the wrong recipient. With many people relying on features such as auto-suggest, it’s easy for a user to accidentally send confidential information to the wrong person if they aren’t careful.
5. Not installing patches or delaying installing updates are also issues. When cybercriminals find a vulnerability in software, developers race to fix it, hopefully before cybercriminals can compromise more users. That’s why it’s essential everyone installs security updates as soon as they're available.
6. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS): A DDoS attack is a blunt instrument intended to disrupt a website by overloading it with traffic. While DDoS attacks can't be used to steal user data or gain root access, they can hurt a company's bottom line and reputation. The 2014 DDoS attack on Sony's PlayStation Network Service, which barred players from accessing the service to buy and play games, is one of the more famous examples of a DDoS attack.

Almost All Information Security Breaches Are Caused by Human Error

There are many reasons why bad actors commit successful cyberattacks, though it's safe to say human error typically plays a part. With the proliferation of password managers, authenticator apps, physical 2FA, and biometrics, it's harder than ever to remember login information and keep it secure. So, when you present an obstacle, it's only logical that someone will attempt to go around it rather than through it. That's how employees with cybersecurity training start taking small shortcuts, which is all a bad actor needs to get past a security system.

Even when employees follow strict password protocols, cybercriminals can use social engineering to trick employees. By exploiting humans, hackers can gain access to critical systems and steal confidential information without writing a single line of code.

Cybercriminals “don’t go through a machine first, they go through a person,” said EMEA chief technologist of VMware Duncan Epping in our recent MIT Technology Review report. “Make sure you educate every single person within your organization, not just the people within the IT team. Everyone needs to understand what these types of attacks will look like and what the impact could be.”

Software Vulnerabilities

An employee taking a shortcut is one thing, but when a company does it to save money, the result can be catastrophic. Take, for example, what happened to Equifax. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) sent Equifax a notice about a vulnerability affecting certain versions of Apache Struts.

1. The first human error: Equifax sent out a mass internal email about the flaw instead of responding by fixing the vulnerability.
2. A second machine error: an automatic scan failed to identify the vulnerable version of Apache Struts.
3. The third human error: the device inspecting encrypted traffic was misconfigured because of an expired digital certificate.

All this enabled a bad actor to crack into Equifax’s system undetected, exposing the personal information of 145 million people in the U.S. and more than 10 million in the UK. In 2018, the Information Commissioner’s Office issued Equifax a fine of £500,000, the maximum penalty allowed under the Data Protection Act 1998, for failing to protect the personal information of up to 15 million UK citizens during the data breach.

What Can You Do?

Cybercriminals are always looking for new ways to penetrate security systems. Whether it's a new software exploit or a clever bit of social engineering, the world of cybersecurity is constantly shifting. Rather than sit around waiting for a new cyberattack to infiltrate your network, you should be proactive.

These are some of the ways you can defend against cyberattacks.

1. Update all software and drivers: Software is one of the biggest cyber threats to an organization. There are cybersecurity firms that specialize in finding security flaws within software before hackers do, allowing software companies a chance to update before the software is exploited on a large scale. While it can be tedious to update various software regularly, doing so will ensure hackers can't access your network via something like an outdated Nvidia GPU driver or Microsoft Exchange email server.
2. Use a virtual private server (VPS): If you've ever used a Minecraft server, you may already be familiar with the idea of a private server. Unlike public servers such as Google Drive, which are open to anyone, virtual private servers are limited to your organization. With a public server, you relinquish your security to a large entity that may not be on top of its cyber security, leaving your data vulnerable to breaches.
3. Cyber security courses for employees: As you already know by this point, human error presents a sizeable cyber threat to a company's cybersecurity. The best way to mitigate human error from causing a cyberattack is by training employees. Giving employees the tools to spot bad actors can be a great deterrent to cyberattacks. Otherwise, a company may get stuck between a rock and a hard place, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and lawsuits from customers and users.

Watch Our Free Cybersecurity Webinar

Watch our Human Error and Bad Actors webinar to learn the best prevention practices and solutions OVHcloud has for mitigating human error and protecting your business from bad actors.