Guard your systems from cyber attacks

Cyber threats are not only present for your physical IT equipment but also affect a combination of the data they hold and the services they run or provide for the practice.

The range of cyber threats is constantly evolving, but most of them involve attacking the confidentiality, integrity or availability of data or systems. 

Vin Pandha reports in the last of her series on protecting your practice from fraud.

Common cyber crimes

PHISHING

Cyber attacks often start with a phishing email. We covered the subject of phishing in more detail in our November issue, but these emails can target your technology and will appear to come from a trusted sender. Emails will have a link or an attachment which, if accessed, will download malware (malicious software) and this is can enable criminals access to your systems and data.

DENIAL OF SERVICE (DoS)

This type of attack is an attempt to make an online resource, such as a website, unavailable to its intended users by overloading it with internet traffic. 

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a specific class of DoS where the attack originates from multiple sources, often using a huge network of computers infected with malware, known as a ‘botnet’. 

This allows the attacker to create a much larger volume of internet traffic against their target and helps to hide the origin of the attack.