When people think about business cyber security solutions, they often focus on basic answers like securing server ports and strengthening password requirements. Those solutions are excellent as a starting point. However, the cyber security game is dominated by evolutionary responses that often encourage increasingly sneaky attacks.

Awareness is the first big step in confronting these problems. Of the sneakier issues in the industry, you need to start by increasing your awareness of these four.

Social Engineering Attacks

In hacking circles, people have long been nothing but meatware waiting for defeat. Email phishing is a classic attack vector where a hostile party approaches a target from a position of apparent innocence. For example, an attacker might tell an administrator that they're an employee who lost their password. If the attacker has already identified a real account on a weak system, the password opens the way into the system. Once in, they'll poke around for vulnerable systems until they find something that allows them to escalate their privileges and take control.

A layered defense is critical to confronting social engineering attacks. Multifactor authentication forces would-be attackers to peel more layers and risk exposure. A cyber security provider may also restrict your non-public systems to only accepting requests from specific IP addresses, too.

Unauthorized Software

Users on networks often decide to install software due to preferences. A business cyber security provider sees this as a major vulnerability. While bringing your own software to work might be more convenient, it also risks running malicious code on your systems.

The key to preventing unauthorized software installations is to limit user privileges. Cyber security solutions should force systems to default to providing the least privileges necessary for each user's job. Even administrators should only escalate their privileges when necessary for installs, updates, and upgrades.

IoT Vectors

The Internet of Things is a catch-all category for the various small devices that now connect to many networks. Even something as seemingly innocuous as a smart light bulb could serve as an IoT attack vector. The device could have network access, and then a hacker outside the building might compromise it to then free-ride the device's access.

Resource Hijacking

With the rise of processor-intensive activities like cryptocurrency mining, hostile parties are often more interested in your company's hardware resources than its information. Hijacking a bank of servers allows a crypto miner to deploy massive resources to compute the hashes that are central to cryptocurrencies. Worse, the attackers often lay low, only using spare resources to avoid detection. You end up seeing the loss in the form of increased electricity bills.

For more information on cyber security solutions, contact a professional near you.