It’s the age of big data, which has been so easily named the sexiest job of the 21st century. With the technology covering space like never before, there has risen a need for big enterprises to evolve and deploy stronger measures of security, especially one that is cyber in nature. This holds to be particularly true for private equity firms. Why? Because very often, these are the kind of businesses that outsource their online security needs, so as to save a cut on the budget. This could potentially turn out to be damaging to the top private equity firms.
Hackers have grown both in their numbers as well as in their techniques targeting people. Such sophisticated forms of threat need to be dealt with an equally strong approach. In this post, we will look to inform such private equity firms, of the kind of dangers that they need to be aware of:
Ransomware – These are the kind of attacks in which files on the subject computer stand a chance to be corrupted to a great extent. In addition to that, they could also result in extracting money out from the firm’s pocket. The latest and arguably the most horrifying real-world instance of it was with the WannaCry malware. A hacker had infected thousands of Windows-based computers and only granted access to users when paid in digital tokens of bitcoins. This just goes on to tell how elementary it is to be done away with system flaws for the top private equity firms.
Social Engineering – What it does is that it makes the people give out information in a compliant manner, meaning that nobody gets to know that they are inadvertently feeding confidential info. to the hacker. These could include passwords, email accounts, keys and what not. Few of the ways in which such attacks are carried out are email phishing, voice phishing & SMS phishing.
Hacking as it is – this is kind of disruption in businesses, that is caused mainly for political purposes. The goal of the hacker is not to extract money but to simply disrupt the services of the enterprise. Terrorists today rely the most on these kinds of resorts to wreak havoc. There is little to no reckoning here, for any collateral damage whatsoever on part of the hacker.
The Insiders – the threat of this perhaps can never be entirely eliminated. People from within a top private equity firm, who have access to classified information, may be persuaded into leaking information. So even though the private equity firm had ensured enough gateways to safeguard its numbers, at the end of the day, people might be the ones to cause the theft. Edward Snowden was once an unknown analyst in the National Security Agency of the USA. Look what he did by leaking millions of documents, from the other side.
