European report highlights top cyber threats

Cyber criminals and hacking attacks

One of the top concerns if you're running web servers at the current time is likely to be the growing threat posed by cyber criminals and hacking attacks. The variety and sophistication of these has been increasing over the last few years and isn't looking like slowing down any time soon. But its not just attacks attempting to take your website down or steal confidential data that you need to be worried about, as one growing problem is programs that infect web servers in order to spread to the PCs of visitors.

It could be the case that seriously harms your reputation if your website is found to be unwittingly delivering malware, so it's something you need to keep an eye on. In fact, drive-by exploits were recently found to be the top web threat for 2013.

This is according to the EU's cyber security agency ENISA, which recently published its Cyber Threat Landscape report, which analysed over 120 studies in 2012 to provide a comprehensive overview of the web landscape.

It identified ten top threats that anyone that works online needs to be aware of. These are:

1. Drive-by exploits
2. Worms/trojans
3. Code injection attacks
4. Exploit kits
5. Botnets
6. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
7. Phishing
8. Compromising confidential information
9. Rogueware/scareware
10. Spam

Several of these have the potential to cause serious disruption among businesses, so it's important you have the right procedures and technologies in place to prevent your servers falling victim to malicious attacks - whether it be in the form of malware that infects your systems or DDoS and hacking attacks that can compromise your website or data.
ENISA made a number of recommendations as part of its report to ensure that businesses are better able to fight cyber attacks in the coming year. These include having the latest security controls available to deal with emerging threat types and gathering intelligence about attacks - such as its starting point and impact - so companies are better able to prepare for the future.
With such a wide variety of potential threats being faced by businesses it's clearly important you plan carefully to minimise your risk and keep both you and your customers safe.