Photo by Jefferson Santos on Unsplash

By Arthur Moses Opio

In this day and age and with the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been woven into almost every facet of our lives. With our increased exposure to technology, we have become highly susceptible to cyber attacks too. Every day we receive emails from known and unknown sources with attachments and links to click. Without an eagle eye, we can take what's fake to seem legitimate. 

Data Breaches continue to increase and this should be of great concern to individuals, governments, companies, etc. Increased zero-day attacks and users of systems not knowing if they have already been compromised or not, puts us at the greatest disadvantage ever. A simple notice to update a browser can go far in mitigating huge data breaches, but somehow either the information doesn't reach the end-user on time or some people just don't take cybersecurity seriously.

Statistics of Data Breaches

1. In 2020, phishing accounted for 1 in every 4.200 emails. Every minute, companies lose $17,700 due to a phishing attack. [Symantec]
2. The average cost of a malware attack sits at $2.6 million. [Accenture]
3. Worldwide cybercrime costs will hit $6 trillion annually by the end of 2021. That number will rise to $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. [Cybersecurity Ventures] source [PhoenixNAP]

It wasn't too long when Naked Security, warned people about a bug in the Google Chromium browser code, Google was well aware of the exploit that was going on in the wild. Members were hence encouraged to update/patch up to avoid being victims of the attack.

Imagine you have already been compromised and you start noticing different things happening to your accounts or even your computer.

Normally one of the first things we tell people is to change their passwords and most times these passwords are changed on an already compromised computer which isn't the best thing to do. It is advisable to change your password from a clean computer/smart device to avoid exposing yourself to an already compromised machine.

Once you have been compromised, it is hard to trust your data and files. Find out more about what a compromised system is from this article and what you can do when you discover you have been comrpomised?