Essentials of Cybersecurity Threats

Explore how malware and ransomware threaten individuals and organizations, including viruses, worms, trojans, rootkits, adware, spyware, and cryptojacking; learn how vulnerabilities and phishing enable infections.

Protect against malware and ransomware by following five steps: back up data regularly and test restores, apply updates, upgrade operating systems, install firewalls, and use anti-malware with daily updates.

Explore how phishing and smishing use social engineering to steal credentials and money via fraudulent emails and texts, urgent messages, forged sites, and impersonations, including spear phishing.

Protect against phishing and smishing by enabling email filtering, blocking fraudulent sites, using a password manager, and enforcing multi-factor authentication, plus security training and phishing simulations.

Learn how business email compromise (Bec) uses phishing, spearphishing, social engineering, and impersonation of executives to trick employees into fraudulent payments, highlighting its costs.

Protect against business email compromise (BEC) by implementing email filtering and SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, while enforcing MFA, security awareness training, and lookalike-domain checks for transfers out-of-band.

Explore how botnets, formed by malware-infected computers and IoT devices, act as force multipliers to unleash DDoS attacks by flooding targets with HTTP requests.

Protect against botnets and DDoS threats with firewalls or WAFs, load balancers or CDNs, and DDoS defense services, plus monitoring and response planning.

Explore zero day attacks exploiting unknown vulnerabilities, as shown by Stuxnet. Strike before patches exist, risking data breaches, financial loss, and physical damage, while detection remains challenging for security defenses.

Protect your organization from zero-day attacks by enforcing robust patch management and timely updates, while leveraging threat intelligence and security information and event management systems for anomaly detection.

Explore how AI-driven cyberattacks use deepfakes and voice cloning to enable social engineering, phishing, and business email compromise, and learn defense strategies.

Learn to defend against AI-based cyberattacks by training users to recognize deepfakes and AI-powered phishing, spot audio and video artifacts, and verify requests through alternate channels.

Explore advanced persistent threats (apts), their reconnaissance, initial compromise, footholds, lateral movement, and data exfiltration, then learn defense through threat intelligence, patching, training, and incident response.

Identify critical assets, enforce least privilege, and monitor user activity with a SIM to protect against insider threats, including malicious and unintentional incidents.

Explore how unmanaged IoT devices threaten cybersecurity with data leakage, botnets, and DDoS, and examine drivers, vulnerabilities, and the IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act.

Identify and inventory all IoT devices on your network, then segment critical assets, block unnecessary ports, and enforce strong authentication and timely updates to reduce unmanaged IoT threats.

Explore the rise and risks of shadow IT, the unauthorized use of systems by employees, and how unapproved tech can lead to data loss, data breaches, and unpatched vulnerabilities.

Protect against shadow IT by implementing core controls and a clear deployment process, and adopt asset inventory, security monitoring, NAC, and CASB to detect unauthorized systems.