Increasing the invulnerability of work on the network: the main trends of 2025

The problem of security when working on the Internet is a trend that has remained relevant for a long period of time and, unfortunately, despite all attempts to normalize and improve the situation, the threats remain quite high. The thing is that in parallel with the improvement of protection, the tools of Internet intruders are also being modified. Fraudulent sites, hackers, malicious links are what, alas, have become commonplace in the digital environment. Therefore, the issue of ensuring protection from all this remains relevant as never before. One of the most serious problems is that today cybercriminals do not even need to use very complex and sophisticated hacking methods. They simply wait until users make literally a minute of inattention, a minor mistake, frivolity, which will open a loophole for them to access their device.

We are not escalating the situation, but just saying it as it is in reality today. It is just that now everything has turned out in such a way that the digital environment is very saturated with various threats and risks. Users must understand that any careless click can launch a chain of interconnected events that carry a high danger. Internet attackers are not asleep. They are developing and implementing increasingly advanced and sophisticated technological tricks, social engineering techniques. One of the studies conducted last year showed that the average losses from cyber attacks have already exceeded $10.5 trillion and this, unfortunately, is not the limit. Both direct and indirect losses, including reputational ones, were taken into account here.

What can an ordinary user, a business representative, an entrepreneur do in such a situation to ensure decent security indicators when working on the Internet? The most effective solution is to build a reliable digital shield, which will consist of several layers of protection that complement each other. And the more such layers are provided, the more you can complicate the work of cybercriminals and even, perhaps, force them to abandon the attempt to attack you.

In today's review, we will talk in detail about what direct and hidden threats from cyber hacks are relevant today. We will highlight the main areas that attract special attention from Internet intruders at the present time. Let's consider in detail the elements that each of you can use to build your own security system. Here are some additional recommendations that you can use to minimize the financial and reputational consequences of cyber attacks. The information provided will help you assess the risks of our time that each of you may face in practice today and take a number of reliable measures to prevent them or at least minimize the danger.

You can read more about various threats and ways to eliminate them in the article «Cyberwars of the past and future».

Consequences of cyber attacks that are most often encountered in practice today

When we talk about the consequences of cyber attacks, we primarily mean direct financial losses. This may include ransom costs, costs of restoring systems affected by Internet intruders, and compensation payments to victims. But, unfortunately, the risks are not limited to this. Many years of practice have repeatedly shown that along with direct ones, there are also hidden problems that carry a much more serious danger.

And the special risk here is that such threats are very often underestimated, but they have a negative impact on business, and in the very long term. It may happen that your company will not suffer direct financial losses from hackers, but its further work on the market will be ineffective, which will ultimately simply lead to the closure of the business. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you also evaluate the hidden costs of cyber hacks. Here, everything directly depends on the field in which you work, whether your company is represented on the international or local market. The scale of losses and the company may differ greatly from these and many other aspects. However, the main categories will be relevant everywhere. We are talking about such moments as:

1. Decrease or even complete loss of productivity. The actions of an Internet attacker can lead to the fact that your business will be paralyzed for a fairly long period of time. As a result, the entire work process is frozen, dissatisfaction arises among clients and business partners. The overall efficiency of your company is reduced to a minimum, the flow of income stops.
2. Damage to reputation. Every organization that would like to develop steadily in the market makes a lot of efforts to show itself well to the audience, to recommend itself as a reliable and reputable supplier of goods, services, to win the trust of clients and business partners. That is, work is being done on reputation. In the event that a system is hacked or data is leaked, this can have an extremely negative impact on the level of trust, which will entail an outflow of clients, the withdrawal of invested funds. Sales volumes will sharply go down, and your company will no longer be perceived as reliable in the market. Clients will go to the closest competitors. By the way, online platforms capable of assessing the state of cybersecurity of a particular business are gaining popularity today. If your company has a low rating, this is fraught with the fact that even regular customers and partners of an international company will simply refuse to work with you, financial institutions will stop issuing loans for development, you will not be able to count on various grants.
3. Application of penalties, additional legal costs. This problem is faced by all those who, when doing business, decide to ignore the key security requirements prescribed in such standards as GDPR, CCPA, NIS2. This is especially true for companies operating in the international market. This can lead to multi-million dollar fines, serious lawsuits from customers or partners who will suffer as a result of a hacker attack on your organization. That is, it is important for you to carefully study the requirements prescribed in the GDPR, CCPA, NIS2 and implement appropriate measures aimed at increasing the protection of user data from leaks.
4. Increasing costs for business insurance policies. As the risk of a cyberattack on your organization increases, the costs of cyber insurance will also increase. Today, such a practice, unfortunately, is not yet very widespread in a number of countries, although it is already used everywhere in Europe and the USA. However, gradually, companies offering business insurance services against cyber incidents are appearing in other regions. Here, the potential risk is initially assessed, as well as the level of the organization's resistance to the actions of Internet intruders. Accordingly, the higher the potential danger, the more expensive the policy itself will be.
5. Investments in staff training. This is another expense item associated with the increased risks of working on the Internet. If you work in a niche where the threat level is quite high, then do not spare money on training your staff on how to behave correctly online. Unfortunately, the human factor can rightfully be called one of the most vulnerable elements in the overall security system. It is important that every person with access to a computer understands what risks they are exposed to and what actions can be taken to minimize them.

So which areas of business are currently most often targeted by hacker attacks? Who should be especially vigilant?

The main "targets" of hackers

Learning to think like a criminal is a recommendation that will be relevant for absolutely any business representative. You should try to understand what exactly in your company can attract the attention of intruders and, accordingly, take measures to strengthen this segment. But in any case, when choosing their targets, cybercriminals focus on causing the maximum possible harm, and in some cases also on obtaining the maximum potential profit. If we analyze the situation that was relevant on the market last year, we can highlight the following business sectors:

• Government organizations and the public sector as a whole. In this case, the key goal of Internet attackers will be information about the economy, national security of certain citizens of the country. The hacker attacks themselves are mainly aimed at destabilizing the work of the organization, undermining its reputation, and stealing important information. Over the past few years, the number of cyberattacks on government organizations in many countries around the world has increased several times. Moreover, this is true for both national and local governments.
• Defense and security. Over the past few years, the number of cyberattacks in this segment has increased by more than 50%, and in different countries around the world. This is largely due to the growing tension in the world as a whole. Here, valuable confidential information and technological developments are at risk.
• Financial services sector. This includes not only banks, but also other similar organizations. This is due to the fact that the cost of data to be stored in this segment is quite high. There is also a significant increase in cyber attacks, many of which, unfortunately, have been successful. A significant share here is also accounted for by direct theft of funds.
• Other sectors of the economy. The most frequent hacker attacks over the past year were on energy, logistics companies, manufacturing enterprises, telecommunications and media. Their analysis shows an increase in sophistication and destructiveness. Financial damage is constantly increasing, there is a serious threat to the reputation of organizations.

All these trends will remain relevant in the current year and in the foreseeable future, since this is where the maximum amount of information is concentrated that will be of great interest to modern Internet intruders.

Current trends that will help increase resistance to cyber threats

We have already repeatedly talked about how to increase cyber security when working on the Internet, to ensure increased resistance of local computer networks to external influences in our reviews. But still, along with those methods that are widely used by information security specialists, today there are also a number of less obvious, but still very important points that each of you can use in practice today. With their help, you will significantly improve your own resistance to various cyber threats. In particular, we would recommend paying attention to the following points:

1. Minimizing risks when using email.
2. Activating an ad blocker.
3. Updating access rights and setting restrictions.
4. Integrating DNS filtering
5. Using web services instead of applications.
6. Forming powerful financial protection.
7. Using multi-factor authentication.

In order for you to be able to take advantage of these recommendations and implement them within your business, we will consider each option in more detail.

Minimizing risks when using email

Historically, email is one of those channels of interaction between the user audience and business representatives that is most often subject to hacker attacks. This is due to the fact that in this case it is quite easy and simple to intercept a forwarded message and subsequently extract the necessary information from it. Moreover, given the active use of e-mail by businesses, attackers are well aware of all the nuances and features of these works. They have been honing their deception technologies for decades, learned to create letters that are almost impossible to distinguish from legitimate mailings coming from a particular company or service. And even advanced modern spam protection tools do not always detect such disguised letters. And the whole point is that they are based on innovative social engineering techniques.

But this is clearly not a reason to throw out the e-mail newsletter from your arsenal, thereby removing one of the most effective channels for communicating with the audience. You just need to slightly increase the security of these works. In particular, we recommend connecting special mail clients with additional security settings to work. One of such solutions can be called the Thunderbird mail client, developed specifically for the Windows operating system. In particular, in it you can disable the HTML mode of letters. Thanks to this solution, they will be displayed simply in text form. At the same time, the execution of hidden scripts is excluded, which ultimately minimizes the likelihood of clicking on malicious links. Despite its apparent simplicity, this technique will be quite effective in practice.

If you work with a personal device from Apple, then a similar effect can be achieved by disabling remote content. This is done directly through the settings of the mail application. Such a simple measure will prevent an intruder from tracking user activity, will allow you to stop the process of downloading potentially dangerous content, including that which may contain malicious links.

Activating the ad blocker

You have probably already heard the phrase that it is better to prevent any problem than to eliminate its consequences. This is also true in the digital space. Therefore, in the field of cybersecurity, prevention is given a fairly serious place and attention. The relevance of such measures is no less than the organization of active protection. Here, the use of modern ad blocking methods has shown good results in practice. The functionality of such products has long since moved away from the classic improvement of the quality of work on the Internet.

The fact is that modern cybercriminals have increasingly begun to use rather sophisticated and extraordinary methods to disguise malicious links. They have learned to very skillfully introduce such links into advertising banners that look completely harmless. Dangerous elements are disguised as fairly attractive content, stimulating the audience to perform thoughtless, impulsive actions.

In such conditions, modern ad blockers are something that can be used as, so to speak, the first echelon of defense, stopping potential threats literally at the moment they appear. That is, in this case, not only intrusive banners will be blocked, but also all malicious scripts that were hidden in them. As a result, the risk of the user switching to dangerous Internet sites is noticeably reduced, and in some cases even reduced to a minimum.

Only in this case we recommend paying attention to truly reliable and advanced modern solutions. Among other things, these include uBlock Origin, AdBlock, AdGuard, etc. Here, it is worth relying on solutions that enjoy high responses, including among government agencies working in the field of cybersecurity.

Updating access rights and setting restrictions

The main trend in ensuring high cybersecurity indicators today involves the use of the so-called proactive approach. The point is that an attack cannot be called successful and inevitable even if a malicious file is downloaded to your device. That is, in this case, we are talking about the fact that in order to maintain high security indicators, it is important to ensure that your software always remains at a high level.

The fact is that regular updates — This is not just an opportunity to use more modern software with advanced options, but also a very important point that closes many modern vulnerabilities that attackers can use in practice. When releasing the next update, developers first of all pay attention to what solutions are currently used by Internet attackers and build countermeasures into their updated program. That is, each new update is another step in organizing high security indicators.

We would also like to remind you of the need to limit access rights for each account depending on the professional duties and tasks of a particular user. Alternatively, installing various programs and making changes to system settings should be performed exclusively by the administrator. In any case, it is assumed that the appropriate access password will be entered here. Thanks to this, the management of extremely important and particularly sensitive information for your business will be in the hands of a person who is a priori well acquainted with the principles of safe work on the Internet and will be able to minimize potential risks. You can be sure that a good system administrator will never allow unauthorized installation of malicious software.

Integrating DNS filtering

In order for your security system to be as effective as possible, it is important to make it multi-level, add additional strategies and protection mechanisms. In this case, even if a malicious link somehow gets into the user's field of view, the results of its impact will not be so dire, since it will be possible to prevent particularly serious consequences.

Thus, one of such solutions that can provide quite impressive results in practice can rightfully be called filtering Internet traffic using specialized DNS servers. In practice, such solutions work as multi-level complex filters capable of blocking access to all those malicious sites whose danger has been confirmed in practice, as well as to new domains that cause additional suspicion and doubt in the system, pages with content that carries a potential danger.

The setup process itself in this case is quite simple and fast, but at the same time it allows you to block a significant part of the traffic that carries a potential danger, that is, to prevent its distribution even before loading. If the user accidentally clicks on a suspicious link, the page simply will not load, thereby preventing a potential infection. This approach can provide high protection rates for absolutely all user devices and applications that are connected to the Internet.

Using web services instead of applications

We now live in the era of digitalization. And one of the current trends here can be called the departure from installed applications. The fact is that many of them have extended access to sensitive user data. In addition, there is a risk that they will contain vulnerabilities that are not so easy to identify in advance. Therefore, eliminating the use of classic applications can rightfully be called one of the elements of an independent security strategy.

They can be replaced with similar web versions. These can be various video platforms, social networks, as well as many other popular services. The fact is that here work will be carried out directly through browsers, and they, in turn, are distinguished by high security indicators. In particular, they implement an additional level of protection by isolating web content, as well as fairly strict restrictions on access to the system resources of the server itself.

Formation of powerful financial protection

You should always think ahead, never discounting the possibility that your business may be subject to hacker attacks. And if such a malicious attack is successful, it is important to think in advance about how you can minimize material losses. And one of the most effective solutions in this case would be to restrict access to the funds that are in the company's accounts. In this case, such a solution can be called strategic in terms of ensuring financial protection.

In particular, it is recommended to set small limits on daily transactions, connect virtual cards to work instead of real ones and make all online payments through them. This is what will help minimize financial risks and prevent theft of funds. It is also important to provide an additional level of security. In this case, as an option, it is recommended to store the bulk of the funds in accounts that are not directly linked to cards. That is, these will be the accounts that can be managed only if additional actions are taken to confirm their legitimacy.

Using multi-factor authentication

Multi-factor authentication is what can rightfully be called the last line of defense. Even if malicious software gets onto your personal computer or some other device, this technology will help build an insurmountable barrier for hackers. In particular, all risks associated with theft of login and password access are practically minimized here.

Today, one of the most reliable technologies in the field of authentication can be called Passkeys, that is, access keys. Hardware encryption is used here, which makes the security system virtually invulnerable to phishing attacks. If you are unable to use this method at the moment, you can use special authenticator applications, which, among other things, also guarantee fairly high protection rates.

Ways to Minimize Losses from Hacker Attacks

The fact that you are implementing a good cybersecurity system at your enterprise or company is great. Moreover, this is exactly what absolutely any business should strive for. But still, unfortunately, you cannot know exactly what actions Internet attackers will take at the next moment in time. That is, there is always a risk that even the most advanced security system may not give the desired results. This means that it is important to be prepared for any unforeseen situations and think in advance about how you can minimize potential financial and reputational risks. And here we would like to give a number of recommendations:

• Consider automating the backup process. In this case, even if data is stolen, you will not be left without important information, as you will be able to restore it quickly and easily. For direct storage, it is recommended to use cloud services or reliable offline environments. This is what will increase the level of security of your data.
• Make cybersecurity training a mandatory element of your corporate culture. They should be held regularly, and they should take into account current modern trends, practical advice, and recommendations for use. This is what will increase staff awareness of all threats that exist today when working online and teach them to minimize risks.
• Develop a consistent action plan to respond to cyber threats and all incidents associated with them. You should have an Incident Response Plan at your disposal, which would include all stages of a potential hacker impact on your device: identifying the problem, localizing it, neutralizing it, and then restoring the system. Most of these types of work are performed by the company's own information security employees, but if necessary, third-party specialists can also be involved. This is relevant for cases where the business security system requires deep expertise, as well as the development of individual protection strategies that can identify threats in each specific case and respond to various incidents as quickly as possible.
• Make it a habit to audit your own security system once a year, which includes updating the software you use. Special patches that can quickly eliminate identified vulnerabilities should also be updated regularly.
• Never skimp on the security of corporate systems. You should constantly invest in modern tools to protect against malware, phishing and DDoS attacks. This is what will allow you to always be prepared even for fairly serious hacker attacks.

If you use these recommendations, you can reduce the likelihood of serious financial and reputational damage if Internet attackers pay attention to your business. In any case, you cannot do without an active approach of additional investments and immediate response. This is the only way to reduce potential risks and increase your company's resilience to them, and along with this, the competitiveness of the business as a whole.

Summing up

Unfortunately, despite all the measures that the world community is taking to ensure high levels of security when working on the Internet, they will be insufficient. Complete security in the digital world, alas, is unattainable either today or in the foreseeable future. But it is within your capabilities to increase your own resilience to the actions of intruders, as well as the stability of your business even if it is subjected to such an attack.

And one of the most effective solutions in this case can rightfully be called multi-level protection. It can significantly reduce the effectiveness of hackers' actions, and in some cases, completely abandon the idea of attacking your business: each additional barrier will complicate their work and will most likely lead to them stopping literally halfway.

In today's review, we looked at the main methods that should be included in a comprehensive security solution and suggested what benefits almost every business can appreciate from their implementation in practice. We also talked about the obvious and hidden risks that are relevant today, identified the areas of the market that most often face hacker attacks, and provided a number of recommendations designed to minimize losses from malicious influences.

And finally, we would like to draw your attention to such a product as mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service. In this case, we are talking about an intermediary server that will replace the real IP-address and geolocation of your user device with its own technical parameters, which will allow you to bypass regional restrictions and other access restrictions, maintain high levels of privacy and security when working on the Internet. With them, your online activities will be free of the slightest risk, since neither the system nor an Internet intruder will be able to identify you as an end user. This is largely ensured by simultaneous operation on the HTTP (S) and Socks5 protocols, the use of the capabilities of cellular network operators, and the dynamics of address change.

You can verify the effectiveness and reliability of this solution before purchasing it by taking advantage of a free two-hour mobile proxy test. You can learn more about this solution at the link https://mobileproxy.space/en/user.html?buyproxy. If you encounter any additional difficulties in your subsequent work, if you need consultations or help from specialists, please contact the technical support service. Our team is available 24/7.

Share this article: