What is hacking?
What do you think of when you hear the word “hacker”? It may conjure images of hooded figures hunched over keyboards in dark rooms, and it certainly hints at nefarious digital activity.
But what is a hacker really? And how can they hurt (or help) your business?
Once solely the subject of Hollywood movies and social media rumour mills, hacking has now become an everyday reality and one of the challenges that all businesses must be prepared to face at any time.
Put simply, hacking is the act of breaking into a computer system by circumventing its security measures. Hackers seek to find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer security systems in order to gain access, which they then use to carry out destructive, damaging or nuisance acts. They can steal passwords, access financial and social media accounts, install backdoors to your systems, and generally wreak havoc on your organisation’s operations and reputation.
The motivation behind hacking is difficult to define, as it is likely you will never know who was behind the assault, so it’s impossible to know why your business was targeted. Therefore, cyber resilience needs to be a core consideration for all organisations, and an assumption must be made that an attack is imminent at any time.
Effects of hacking
The scale of the threat from hacking is often underestimated, as almost every electronic device has the potential to be hacked. With the increasingly widespread use of internet of things (IoT) applications, this means that a significant amount of routine equipment can be impacted by cyber-crime. This includes, but is not limited to, mobile phones, digital locking systems, clocks, and refrigerators affecting anything from your air conditioning settings to your staff rotas.
How exactly can hacking affect my business?
- The time it takes to recover from the attack – beyond the interruption of the initial strike, the impact of hacking can be felt for a long time afterward as it could take a substantial period to rebuild your defences, regain systems access and undo any damage done to restore business continuity
- Reputational damage – this can impact the legitimacy of your organisation, as you risk cultivating a negative perception amongst the public in terms of compliance, reliability and digital literacy
- Losing your users’ trust – a major breach can make headlines and make your customers think twice about whether they can trust you to hold their personal information
- Theft of personal and sensitive data – from information about your employees to details on your clients, hacking exposes all your stakeholders to potential crime
- Vulnerable to being held to ransom – hackers may hold your data hostage and offer its return for a price, but this is no guarantee that you’ll have your stolen information returned
- Risk of fines for data breaches – exposure or loss of users’ personal data through negligence or lack of appropriate security measures can result in a hefty financial penalty from the Information Commissioner’s Office
By exposing themselves to hackers, businesses threaten every part of their operations, which can ultimately lead to decimation. A US government survey found that 60% of small- to medium-sized businesses were unable to recover from a cyber-attack and shut down within 6 months of the incident, showing just how devastating the impact of these attacks can be.
Challenges for small businesses
While coming up against hackers is an accepted certainty for large companies, there is a perception that smaller businesses are less likely to sustain this type of online attack.
Far from being too small to bother with, research has found that small businesses suffer more from hacking attacks than their larger counterparts, as hackers understand that they often employ less sophisticated and secure defences and therefore are more easily infiltrated. Although large businesses generally bear a greater financial cost as a result of cyber-attacks, the impact is likely to be felt more acutely by smaller organisations where additional factors like personal liability are of more concern. The interruption to business can also be devastating, impacting productivity, service provision and customer satisfaction.
An additional challenge to contend with when fighting off hackers is the dynamic nature of technology itself. In a landscape of ceaseless innovation, it can seem like a herculean task for a small business to keep abreast of the changing security exploit opportunities that a hacker hunts full-time. Hackers are incredibly agile and regularly shift techniques in response to countermeasures, which highlights the importance of regular security monitoring and testing to pre-empt emerging offensive tactics. This is where the NCRCG can help.
Ethical hacking
It may sound counter-intuitive to fight hacking with hacking, but there’s another side of the coin when it comes to hackers that may come as a surprise for those that put stock in stereotypes.
Ethical or “white hat” hackers work defensively to protect businesses from cyber attacks before they have a chance to happen. This legal form of hacking harnesses offensive hacking techniques for benevolent reasons and is carried out on behalf of an organisation by trained cyber security personnel to assist them in fortifying their defences and protecting their data.
An ethical hacker seeks to answer the following questions:
- What vulnerabilities does a hacker see?
- What information would a hacker want to access?
- What could a hacker do with this information?
- How can the vulnerability (if any) be addressed?
They set about to find these answers by employing a range of tools and techniques, from basic security hygiene to port sniffing and phishing, and with their in-depth knowledge and advanced cybersecurity technical skills.
Pen testing
One key tool in a white hat hacker’s arsenal is that of penetration testing, commonly known as “pen testing”. Pen testing sees an ethical hacker use the same methods as a hostile hacker would to break through your defences, with the aim of reasserting the system’s strength and exposing any vulnerabilities. This allows the organisation to make the changes necessary to protect from a genuine cyber threat before any sensitive data is exposed.
A pen test is essentially assessing an organisation’s security preparedness, and follows a process as below:
- Reconnaissance – initial scoping to identify the extent of the system to be assessed and agree the approach and boundaries of the test
- Scanning – analysing how the system responds to attempted intrusion by inspecting application coding
- Gaining access – breaching the system defences by employing web application attacks such as backdoors and cross-site scripting to gain understanding of the harm that could be caused
- Maintaining access – imitating the strategies of malicious hackers, the ethical hacker will assess how long they can remain in the system to measure how much damage could potentially be done using the exposed vulnerability
- Analysis – reporting any issues that have been uncovered, assessing the level of risk each poses, and detailing methods of resolution
They will then make recommendations based on their findings highlighting action points necessary to shore up the organisation’s defences. This process allows businesses to have renewed confidence that they have the right strategies in place to protect their infrastructure and reaffirms their compliance and trustworthiness.
How Cyber Resilience Centres Can Help
Pen testing is a comprehensive and lengthy process that must be carried out by specialists; consequently, it is something that many small businesses don’t have the capacity to undertake themselves.
For those organisations without an internal team dedicated to cyber security, the National Cyber Resilience Centre Group exists to provide expert guidance and support and can connect your business with these services to strengthen its cyber resilience.
Get in touch today to see how we can help your business to manage cyber threats and ensure business continuity when an attack does occur.