What is a Cyber Attack?

In simple terms, what does cyber attack mean? It means using digital methods, often malicious, to break into systems or misuse data for financial, political, or strategic gain.

As organizations adopt cloud services, SaaS applications, and generative AI tools, cyber attacks have increasingly shifted from targeting infrastructure to targeting data itself.

What is A Cyber Attack?

A cyber attack occurs when attackers exploit vulnerabilities in technology, processes, or human behavior to gain unauthorized access to systems or data.

Cyber attacking can involve:

• Stealing sensitive data (customer records, intellectual property, credentials)
• Encrypting data for ransom
• Manipulating or destroying data
• Abusing legitimate user access (insider risk)
• Using social engineering to trick users into giving up access

Modern cyber attacks rarely rely on a single technique. Instead, attackers chain together multiple methods, such as technical exploits, stolen credentials, and human deception, to reach valuable data.

Types of Cyber Attacks

Cyber attack types vary widely, but most fall into a few core categories:

1. Malware Attacks: Malicious software such as viruses, spyware, or trojans designed to infiltrate systems and steal or damage data. Learn more about malware.
2. Ransomware Attacks: A ransomware attack is a type of cyber attack where attackers encrypt data and demand payment for its release. While all ransom attacks are cyber attacks, not all cyber attacks involve ransom.
3. Phishing and Social Engineering Attacks: Social engineering attacks manipulate people rather than systems. This is why cyber attackers commonly use phishing attacks; they're effective, scalable, and often bypass technical controls.
4. Credential-Based Attacks: Attackers use stolen or reused credentials to log in as legitimate users, often without triggering alerts.
5. Insider Threats: Cyber attacks can originate from within an organization, whether malicious or accidental, when insiders misuse access to sensitive data.
6. AI-Based Cyber Attacks: The most common AI-based cyber attacks today involve AI-generated phishing emails, deepfake voice or video impersonations, automated reconnaissance and attack scaling.

The biggest cyber attacks in the last five years have shared common traits:

• Credential compromise
• Abuse of legitimate access
• Massive data exposure rather than system destruction

These incidents reinforce a key lesson: data security failures – not infrastructure failures – often cause the most damage.

Cyber Attacks vs. Cyber Threats

A cyber threat is a potential danger, such as a vulnerability, malicious actor, or risky behavior, that could lead to harm. A cyber attack is the execution of that threat.

In other words:

• Cyber threats describe risk
• Cyber attacks describe action

Strong data security programs aim to reduce threats before they become attacks.

Why Cyber Attacks Are Increasing

Cyber attacks are rising in both frequency and severity, driven by the expansion of digital touchpoints across modern business operations. As organizations adopt cloud platforms, mobile workforces, and AI-enabled tools, the attack surface for cyber attackers also grows. At the same time, threat actors are becoming more organized, sophisticated, and financially motivated.

One of the most striking indicators of this trend is how often attacks occur. Globally, cyber incidents are relentless—reporting suggests a cyberattack happens about every 39 seconds, underscoring just how frequently organizations of all sizes are targeted.

This surge in attacks also translates into massive economic impact. According to IBM, the average data breach cost has climbed to $4.92 million, up from $4.45 million last year — a figure that reflects not just direct incident response costs, but lost productivity, reputational harm, legal fees, and long-term operational disruption.

Several factors are driving this escalation:

• Wider attack surfaces: Remote work, cloud adoption, and IoT devices create more entry points that need protection.
• Human vulnerabilities: Social engineering, phishing, and credential theft remain top vectors because they exploit behavior rather than technology alone.
• Monetary incentives: Cybercrime has become a highly profitable underground economy, encouraging more actors to participate.
• AI-powered threats: Automated tools and AI are now used by both defenders and attackers, accelerating scale and sophistication.

For businesses focused on data security, this means that reactive defenses alone are no longer sufficient. The cost and impact of an attack, whether through data loss, downtime, or regulatory fines, require proactive controls that both detect and prevent attacks before critical data is exposed.

Better understand how data security prevents cyber attacks, including insider threats, with our guide.

How To Prevent Cyber Attacks

Prevention is the most commercially valuable, and operationally effective, approach to cyber attacks. To prevent cyber attacks, businesses must focus on data-centric security, not just perimeter defenses.

Key ways to prevent cyber attacks include:

• Know where sensitive data lives across endpoints, cloud, SaaS, and AI tools
• Understand data context (what it is, who owns it, how it's used)
• Enforce least privilege access to reduce blast radius
• Monitor user behavior to detect risky actions early
• Prevent data exfiltration in real time, not after alerts fire

Traditional tools often alert after data is already lost. Modern data security platforms aim to stop attacks at the moment data is put at risk.

However, users and employees are also a growing part of this story, as many cyber attacks begin with social engineering, and users often hold the keys to valuable sensitive data within an organization.

To prevent cyber attacks caused by social engineering, organizations must:

• Apply contextual controls at the point of action
• Limit what users can do with sensitive data
• Detect anomalous behavior even from trusted users

How To Prepare For A Cyber Attack

Even with strong prevention, preparation matters.

How to prepare for a cyber attack:

• Inventory sensitive data and critical systems
• Define clear incident response playbooks
• Practice tabletop exercises
• Ensure rapid containment and recovery capabilities
• Minimize data exposure so breaches have limited impact

Preparation is about resilience, not just recovery.

Preventing Cyber Attacks With DSPM

As cyber attacks increasingly target data rather than infrastructure, prevention strategies must evolve accordingly. Data security posture management (DSPM) helps organizations prevent cyber attacks by providing continuous visibility into where sensitive data lives, how it moves, who can access it, and how it's actually being used.

By understanding data context and risk across cloud, SaaS, endpoints, and AI tools, DSPM enables security teams to:

• Identify high-risk data exposures before attackers do
• Reduce over-permissive access that fuels credential-based attacks
• Detect abnormal data usage tied to insider threats or compromised accounts
• Enforce controls that stop data exfiltration in real time

Rather than reacting after a breach or chasing alerts, DSPM shifts cyber attack prevention left from incident response to proactive risk reduction. In a threat landscape defined by constant cyberattacks, protecting sensitive data wherever it goes is one of the most effective ways to limit both the likelihood and impact of an attack.

Explore how modern data loss prevention solutions can stop cyber attacks in our AI era before they begin.

FAQ

What is cyber attacking?

Cyber attacking refers to the act of deliberately attempting to compromise systems or data through malicious digital techniques.

Explain cyber attack in simple terms

A cyber attack is when someone uses technology to break into systems or misuse data without permission.

What is the difference between a ransom attack and a cyber attack?

A ransom attack is a specific type of cyber attack focused on extortion through data encryption.

What is the most common cyber attack today?

Phishing and credential-based attacks are currently the most common, especially those enhanced by AI.

How do companies defend against each cyber attack?

Companies defend against cyber attacks by combining preventive controls, visibility into data usage, and real-time enforcement.

What are the best ways to prevent cyber attacks?

The best ways to prevent cyber attacks include data visibility, access control, behavior monitoring, and proactive prevention.