Infographic: Is Your Business Safe From Cyberattacks?

We all hope that companies have adequate resources to protect their employees' information. After all, there's a constant flow of sensitive data circulating within the company ranging from personal credit card numbers to corporate records. However, the fact is that hackers have gotten pretty smart. Instead of targeting the enterprise as a whole, many attacks now compromise individual employees. Data security company Imperva released an infographic explaining the stages of a targeted attack and how to protect your organization from these attacks.
Employers can let out a sigh of relief in one respect, though: the report states that less than one percent of employees are malicious insiders. However, all employees have the potential to be compromised insiders.
The Seven Deadly StagesImperva outlines seven stages of a targeted attack. In the first stage, the attacker will size up the organization and search social networking sites, like Facebook or LinkedIn, for individuals whose profiles identify the targeted organization as their workplace. Upon finding an employee, the attacker will compromise the individual with malware, which can be done through phishing emails. In fact, 69 percent of data breaches involve malware. An attacker who is successful in the malware attack will start to explore and snoop around the company's network.
At this point the attacker will start to steal other employees' usernames and passwords and install back doors. It's likely that the attacker will adjust employees' permissions to create "power users," which makes it easier to expose the network to malware compared to a normal user.
The nightmare only continues as the attacker will impersonate a legitimate user and steal sensitive data either on other individuals or the company as a whole. If the attacker hasn't been discovered at this point, he or she will slyly return "power users" permissions back to normal user settings and keep an account on the system to use in case of a return visit.
Protect Your OrganizationYou don't have to be a victim to these malicious attacks. There are eight easy steps to safeguard your organization. To reduce the likelihood of an attack, it's a good idea to identify and build policies to protect sensitive data, and audit any access activity to it.
Since attackers are looking to compromise individuals, train employees in how to identify spear-phishing emails and warn them against opening any suspicious emails. Set up solutions, like antivirus software, that can prevent unwanted software from reaching individual users' devices. Antivirus software should detect if an individual has been compromised or if any devices have been infected. You should also check if there has been abnormal or suspicious user activity.
If you do find any compromised devices, contain them by blocking command and control communications from them. To protect any data you want to keep safe, stop compromised users and devices from accessing sensitive applications and information. A few obvious steps you'll want to take after realizing your devices and passwords have been compromised is to change user passwords and rebuild the devices to help prevent future attacks. Finally, after you've cleaned up all you could on the attack, oversee audit trails and forensics to improve the incident response process in hopes of cutting off attacks earlier rather than later.  
No company is completely safe from cyberattacks, but taking measures to protect sensitive information and installing antivirus software can help prevent the likelihood of attacks and catch malicious activity early on.
Click on the image below to view the full infographic.