Don’t let attackers sneak under your radar: Nik Rawlinson reveals the telltale signs to look out for
CYBERATTACKS don’t look like you might expect—and they certainly don’t look like they do in the movies. If your security is compromised, you probably won’t see a big flashing sign saying ‘YOU HAVE BEEN HACKED’, or weird skull-and-crossbones graphics filling your display.
On the contrary, modern attackers lay low. The era when hackers just wanted to attract attention and cause chaos has long gone—today, they more likely want to use your computer for mining cryptocurrency, or as a staging point for launching anonymous attacks on remote targets. Or, of course, they may intend to quietly encrypt your personal files, with a view to demanding a ransom for the decryption key. Whatever the goal, it’s in their interest to be as discreet as possible, and not to tip you off that you’ve been compromised, at least until their dirty work is done.
Those scenarios apply equally in business environments, along with the additional concern of digital espionage. For a company, the first indication of an intrusion might look like nothing more than a strange coincidence—a rival beating you to market with a product that looks a lot like your own, perhaps, or pursuing contacts and deals in a way that stymies your commercial strategy. It could be sheer bad luck, or it could be that someone has been spying on your confidential plans.
Whatever their intention, attackers know to bide their time, quietly siphoning off your resources or learning about your business. According to figures from Sophos, the average ‘dwell time’— the time an attacker had access to compromised systems before being discovered—was eight days in 2023. That’s an improvement on the average of ten days in 2022 and 15 days in 2021, but it’s still an alarming statistic. Here are some recommendations that can help you identify and resolve attacks quickly—and prevent them happening in the first place.
COMMONTHREAT VECTORS
Computer security is an area where prevention is certainly better than cure. Many hack attacks are enabled by weak passwords, compromised credentials, brute-force attacks, or misconfigured network hardware, so it goes without saying that you should take steps to close off all of these avenues. In business, each of these potential vectors of attack will already be on an administrator’s watchlist, and companies should be enforcing policies to ensure effective credential hygiene. If you’re working from home, or just using your own computer for everyday internet duties, you’ll need to take matters into your own hands.
To sharpen up your passwords, note that length can be more effective than complexity. Common ‘complications’, such as using digits in place of letters, are well understood, and brute-force attacks will breeze through them. How
