Understanding the Landscape of Cybersecurity

You may have heard the saying: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”Unfortunately, hackers have taken this thought to heart during recent times. The number of cyber strike has increased as hackers have repeatedly exploited vulnerable backdoors in corporate systems amid the distraction caused by the recent times. The objectives included health care, financial services and public sector institutions such as the World Health Organization. strike on the financial sector increased by 238% worldwide between February and April.

According to Alissa Abdullah, deputy head of security at Mastercard and former deputy CIO at the White House under President Barack Obama, recent times and the resulting shift to virtual work “changed the capabilities of the adversary and focused on some of the other tools that we use.”

Hackers have also striked collaboration platforms. In April, hackers obtained more than 500,000 usernames and passwords for Zoom accounts and sold them on crime forums on the Dark Web for only a penny per account. Some information was simply transmitted. Cyber strike involving the recent times vaccine have also occurred; in December, the European Medicines Agency reported that some data on the recent times vaccine had been stolen by Pfizer/BioNTech in a cyber strike. Around the same time, IBM raised the alarm about hackers targeting companies at the heart of the distribution of recent times vaccines.

Expect more cyber strike to happen faster

Cyber strike and the associated costs will continue to accelerate. Consider this: Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that cyber strike will occur every 11 seconds in 2021, which is almost twice as many as in 2019 (every 19 seconds) and four times as many as in 2016 (Every 40 seconds). It is estimated that cybercrime now costs the world few billion a year, double the total of few billion in 2015. By 2025, cybercrime is expected to cost the world few trillion every year.

The price of cybercrime includes the theft of intellectual property and personal and financial data, as well as real money — plus the cost of business interruptions after strike, loss of productivity and reputational damage, explains Steve Morgan, founder of Cybersecurity Ventures. In addition to these direct consequences, the hidden costs of cybercrime also include an increase in insurance premiums, a decrease in credit scores and legal fees due to customers who file lawsuits.

A 2020 IBM security report that surveyed 524 injured organizations in 17 countries and 17 industries found that the average cost of a data breach was few million and it took an average of 280 days to contain it. The consequences can last for years after the incident.

Under Fire: Spear-Phishing, Social engineering and Vishing

In the UK, 90% of data breaches in 2019 were due to human error. During the recent times, employees faced increased personal and financial stress, which made them more vulnerable to Spear Phishing—a type of Phishing that targets specific people or groups in an Organization — and to “social engineering” strike aimed at psychologically manipulating individuals to reveal sensitive information.

Specifically, social engineering strike are aimed at tricking employees into doing something that seems legitimate but is not. Although companies generally train employees to identify bluff requests, it has become more difficult for employees to distinguish scams from legitimate requests in the unusual circumstances of the recent times.

“Everyone knows that you can’t take a USB stick from a parking lot and put it in the computer, but training sophisticated employees to fake emails from bosses is always a real problem,” says Thomas Ruland, financial expert of the Toptal network and head of finance and operations at Decentriq, a company specializing in sharing and “If you are not in the same office, accidental data exchanges can be more frequent. When people work in the same body office, they can just ask, “Hey, did you really send that? but it’s more difficult to analyze when you work from home.”

The problem of “Vishing” — voice phishing — has also been exacerbated by the recent times, with strikers using calls to obtain VPN credentials or other sensitive information from employees. Vishing scams often try to appear legitimate by providing potential victims with precise personal information such as a person’s social security number or bank account number. A surprising amount of other personal information is publicly available to strikers who only have to browse social media platforms or other related websites to access these details..