Due to Corona Pandemic, it has been seen that cyber-attacks increased exponentially. One of the cybersecurity organization said, since January 2020 there has been a stunning 30,000% increment in the cyber-attacks including phishing, malicious websites, and other malware are specially designed during COVID-19 pandemic.
VP of Security research ZScaler, Deepan Desai, unveil the facts and figure in a blog post that the companies cloud security platform stopped 380,000 attacks at the home workers during March.
During the Covid pandemic, the company recorded an overall 25% increment in the malicious files and websites as compared to the past. While on the other hand, 85% increment in the phishing attacks with the primary goal to exploit the remote workers that are working from home for the last three months.
These phishing attacks include spear-phishing attacks that appear to send to the employee by either company’s IT Department of payroll department, and even though some of these attackers use the CAPTCHA screens to make fool the company’s security filters.
According to the Zscaler team, many other scams, including fake VPN client applications, Nigerian 419 scams, and COVID-theme suspicious attacks, are also spotted by them.
Magecart attacks have been detected by many security companies that are targeting pharmacies, grocery websites, and other healthcare. Magecart has been designed for the online order but without much of encryption & security protection.
Desai strictly advised to IT Departments & Remotely working employees not to open the links or attachments from unknown sources. Moreover, he suggested enabling 2-factor authentication mechanism to add an extra layer of security.
He concluded, “Each remote user of any organization must come up with a high-level state of awareness of such kind of cybercrimes. Because attackers will continue to use this global crisis as an opportunity of exploiting the companies and their end-users”.
“If any employee of any company is not sure about anything, he/she sees online or receive anything suspicious in their mailbox or SMS, they should be instructed to contact the IT Security Teams to seek help,” continue …
According to the NSCS, Microsoft, and Google, despite the large increment in the cyber threats using COVID-19 pandemic, overall cybercrimes has not been increased much.
