Cyberattacks can take many forms. Those intended to disrupt a business often happen as denial of service (DoS) attacks, and its even more disruptive cousin, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Such attacks are often executed by a botnet, which is a network of infected machines or connected devices at the order of a botmaster. Botnet attacks present yet another challenge for security and IT teams focused on cybersecurity.
Cybercrime can take many forms, and the criminals behind such attacks work with increasing sophistication — even to the point that some companies may, unwittingly, be helping criminals launch attacks against other organizations. For example, botnets are an organized network of infected devices at a hacker’s disposal, which the hacker then uses to carry out cybercrime schemes by harnessing resources available to the bots on the system.
Scraper bots make up the worst of bad bot traffic for the travel industry, with sites witnessing over 90% of traffic attributed to fare scraping. Whilst this activity can be benign or even used for positive means, if uncontrolled it can impact top line revenue, bottom line profits and customer experience.
Influencer marketing is set to be worth $13.8 billion by the end of 2021, rising from $9.7 billion since last year. With many people working from home during the pandemic, monetizing a social media following by creating sponsored posts for brands has become a popular side hustle. This can be seen by the rapid growth of emerging platforms, particularly TikTok which saw over 2 billion downloads in 2020 and a 45% increase in its use by influencers in 2021 to date.
“Buy Now, Pay Later” (or BNPL) schemes are instant approval loans given at the point of sale on eCommerce websites. They are commonly seen on fashion websites, where shoppers are offered the chance to buy products right away and split the payment for their items over several months. Taking the FinTech world by storm in recent years, well-known BNPL providers include Klarna, Clearpay, Laybuy, Payl8r, Afterpay and Affirm.
It’s well known that we just don’t put services or devices on the edge of the Internet without strong purpose justification. Services, whether maintained by end-users or administrators, have a ton of security challenges. Databases belong to a group that often needs direct access to the Internet - no doubt that security requirements are a priority here.
Search engine optimization is one of the most important aspects of any business’s online marketing strategy. A well-maintained SEO plan provides a low-cost, long-term stream of relevant traffic into a website. Conversely, bad SEO can be very damaging to a business. Poor visibility on search engines like Google hands revenue over to competitors, forces higher spend on PPC advertising, and can damage trust with potential customers searching for you online.
For those who have played our Boss of the SOC competition or attended our security workshops, you are undoubtedly aware of Frothly, but in case you are not, here is a quick primer. Frothly is a fictional brewing supply company based in San Francisco who has successes and challenges, just like any other organization.
