IT risks and threats

Your IT infrastructure faces numerous risks and threats, including insider threats, external threats and advanced continuous threats. Insider threats include employees who leak sensitive data about your business, while external threats include viruses, worms, trojan horses, physical theft and more.

Understanding these risks and threats is important because you’ll discover the most effective ways to avoid them. Fortunately, an IT asset management system can help you identify IT risks and threats in your infrastructure allowing you to keep them at bay.

The world of IT is full of terminologies that describe threats and risks, including security threats, security incidents, security events, cyberattacks and hacking. These terminologies are related despite their varying meanings.

For example, ‘security threats’ refer to the malicious acts of corrupting or stealing data or disrupting your company’s IT systems and processes. ‘Security events,’ on the other hand, refer to occurrences that lead to exposure and loss of data. These IT threats and risks continue to advance as cybercriminals acquire more sophisticated skills and tools.

This is why you must continually update your IT systems to make them impenetrable to criminals who may want to harm your business. You can do this by acquiring application portfolio management software to continuously evaluate your apps.

One of the benefits of application portfolio management systems is that it helps you identify any apps in your infrastructure that pose security risks, so that you can update or discard them. It also improves your IT spending efficiency by ensuring that you only buy apps that your business needs.

Keeping your IT infrastructure safe starts by understanding the potential IT risks and threats you’re likely to face in your organization. Here are the most common IT threats and risks:

Internal IT threats

You should be more concerned about internal IT threats and risks than external threats, because the internal ones are closer to your core IT infrastructure and can therefore do more damage to your business. Internal threats occur when people with authorized access to your system access sensitive data and misuse it to harm the organization. These individuals can do this purposely or inadvertently.

Sadly, the consequences of their actions can be detrimental to your business regardless of their intentions. For example, a careless employee can end up opening unsecured links and programs that infect your system with viruses, rendering it compromised.

A disgruntled employee can intentionally delete critical data from your system and disrupt your business processes. They can also sell the data to your competitors or use it to blackmail your company for their personal needs.

Botnets

Botnets are interconnected devices like computers, tablets, smartphones, servers, switches, routers and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices with malware that are controlled remotely.

The malware is designed to infect many devices within a network and perform automated tasks like stealing data, click fraud, and denial-of-service attacks by creating malicious traffic.

Phishing attacks

Phishing attacks use social engineering tricks to compel a user to break your company’s security procedures and end up revealing critical information like names, Social Security numbers, credit card details and login credentials. Hackers can send you a fake email that appears to come from a credible source, such as a financial institution asking you to open a link or an attached document that contains malware that will collect essential details from your system.

If you need a system that will help you manage your IT infrastructure and prevent these threats, talk to Flexera today for advice and assistance!