This Key Threat to Fortune 500 Companies Often Goes Unaddressed
Fortune 500 companies have an impressive aura around them and well-earned reputations. Their leaders have achieved what many smaller companies’ executives aspire to accomplish. However, they also encounter more difficult challenges than one might expect. Despite the major resources that Fortune 500 companies possess, or rather, precisely because of them, Fortune 500 companies still face plenty of security risks. The target on a Fortune 500 company is much bigger than that of a small business because there’s inherently more value in compromising them.
Unfortunately, these companies also experience breaches coming from a widespread threat that no one seems to know how to address. It’s the cause of 95 percent of big attacks on Fortune 500 companies; namely, theft of employee credentials, usually via phish. How do cybercriminals exploit the threat to these companies?
It Starts with Stealing Credentials
Even though Fortune 500 companies go to great lengths to prevent breaches and data theft by hackers, it’s still happening. That’s because despite these companies’ heavy investments in cybersecurity, humans will always be the weakest link in almost any security system.
For example, if a phishing email finds its way into an employee’s inbox, there aren’t many ways to prevent that employee from opening it, and then clicking on a suspicious link or otherwise letting hackers compromise their credentials. Once that happens, hackers can move on to inflict further damage with malware, gaining access to essential servers.
Executing the Attack
Once they breach a company’s defenses, hackers can carry out their attacks in various ways. There are plenty of targets they can infest with malware and make inoperable. Criminals can steal or wipe valuable data, destroy the backup systems, and wreak havoc on disaster recovery systems. It’s a costly battle for Fortune 500 companies, and extremely difficult to recover from.
Preventing the Phishing Threat
Once the cybercriminals invade your infrastructure, it’s hard to rout them out before damage is done. That’s why preventing that first successful phishing attack is critical.
Relying on training your employees to recognize and report phishing attacks does not always yield the desired results. Even alert and motivated employees don’t have the knowledge and skills of a security manager.
Fortunately, once you stop the 95 percent of threats that arrive by phishing, the remaining five percent of attacks are easily preventable by regular patching and updating your security systems.
Area 1 Security offers phishing protection that you can add to the cyber security solutions you already have. We proactively cover your greatest vulnerabilities and prevent the majority of dangerous attacks, while your existing cybersecurity tackles everything else.
Detecting a phishing attack proactively, before it even becomes a threat, is the only way to stop phish from continuously landing in your employees’ inboxes. With Area 1 Horizon, you can stop phishing once and for all.
