I recently spoke with a business owner who wanted to know about the forecast for cybercrime in 2018. Will next year be any different, he asked, or will it be another long stretch of cyberattacks and data breaches?

Unfortunately, the latter scenario seems to be the case. Cybercrime is getting worse by the day, and it should continue to do so in 2018 as the price of malware continues to plummet and it gets easier for amateur hackers to obtain it.

According to a recent study, Web application attacks increased by 30 percent during 3Q17 compared to 2Q17. They also increased by 69 percent compared to the year-ago period.

What’s more, the U.S. experienced a 217 percent rise in cybercrime and a 48 percent increased during 3Q17 compared to the second quarter.

The study also shed some light on how hackers are attacking businesses. SQL injection is now the most widely-used attack method. SQL injection-based attacks rose by 19 percent from the second to the third quarter this year, and by 62 percent from last year.

Other top threats now include ransomware, phishing, distributed denial of service (DDoS) and traditional Trojan-based attacks.

Of course, the threat landscape changes by the day and new types of malware are constantly coming to market. As such, businesses need to take active measures to protect their digital assets.

Make no mistake about it: If you try to avoid cybercrime, it will find your business. You will eventually get hit, and it could be powerful enough to destroy your organization. Most businesses that experience large-scale cyberattacks go out of business within a few months.

So don’t delay. Contact Apex Technology Services today to learn more about how you can protect your organization from cybercrime.

Here are some of the areas all organizations looking to promote a cybersecurity culture need to focus on.

1.    Cybersecurity training must be done regularly.

2.    Auditing and documentation must be performed regularly to ensure systems are secure.

3.    Anomaly detection should be running constantly to detect threats as they emerge.

4.    Penetration testing shows if systems can easily be reached from the outside. Here is a case where this test might have saved two company’s’ reputations from being destroyed.

5.    Network forensics for when a breach eventually occurs. The bad guys always seem to get in eventually.

6.    An action plan to follow when a breach does occur. Once it happens, few will have the clear heads needed to “wing it” correctly. Equifax botched it’s response in what is being called a PR catastrophe.

To ensure your organization is safe – even if you have internal IT, hire an experienced MSP or MSSP like Apex Technology Services.