Book Image

Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies - Second Edition

By : Tim Rains
3 (2)
Book Image

Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies - Second Edition

3 (2)
By: Tim Rains

Overview of this book

Tim Rains is Microsoft's former Global Chief Security Advisor and Amazon Web Services’ former Global Security Leader for Worldwide Public Sector. He has spent the last two decades advising private and public sector organizations all over the world on cybersecurity strategies. Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies, Second Edition builds upon the success of the first edition that has helped so many aspiring CISOs, and cybersecurity professionals understand and develop effective data-driven cybersecurity strategies for their organizations. In this edition, you’ll examine long-term trends in vulnerability disclosures and exploitation, regional differences in malware infections and the socio-economic factors that underpin them, and how ransomware evolved from an obscure threat to the most feared threat in cybersecurity. You’ll also gain valuable insights into the roles that governments play in cybersecurity, including their role as threat actors, and how to mitigate government access to data. The book concludes with a deep dive into modern approaches to cybersecurity using the cloud. By the end of this book, you will have a better understanding of the threat landscape, how to recognize good Cyber Threat Intelligence, and how to measure the effectiveness of your organization's cybersecurity strategy.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
13
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14
Index

Phishing attacks

Social engineering is a mainstay tactic for attackers around the world. Phishing is at the intersection of two of the cybersecurity usual suspects; social engineering and weak, leaked, and stolen passwords. Many of the largest data breaches in history started with a phishing attack. In simple terms, phishing is a social engineering tactic where the attacker tries to trick their victim into sharing confidential information with them. Attackers use emails, websites, and advertising to entice people into disclosing account credentials, personal details, credit card and financial account information, among other things. The information that victims disclose might be used to illegally access online accounts, conduct illegal financial transactions, and steal the victims' identities, among other purposes.

Some attackers cast an indiscriminate wide net for their phishing attacks to snare as many people as possible in order to increase the odds of success. Some attackers...