Covid-19 pandemic definitely left a huge impact on the overall cybersecurity situation.
First, the global lockdown forced many companies to shift to remote work. Cybercriminals took advantage of vulnerable home networks. Many organizations encountered data breaches at the beginning of the work-from-home shift. For instance:
80% of companies reported an increase in cyberattacks in 2020.
Most of the malware was received from email (94% of cases)
At the beginning of April 2020, Google reported it was blocking every day 18 million malware e-mails related to COVID-19.
Between January and April 2020, the attacks on cloud services increased by 630%
Apparently, the healthcare and financial industries were the most affected https://bring-consulting.co.jp/ ones, as they deal with huge amounts of personal data. For instance, various researches show that:
In 2020, 27% of all cyberattacks targeted healthcare and financial sectors
From the beginning of February to the end of April 2020, attacks against the banks rose by 238% (when COVID-19 have started spreading).
Most of the financial institutions (82%) reported that it is more and more difficult to fight against cybercriminals, as they become more and more sophisticated.
2020 has definitely been a good year for online retailers. Even though according to surveys, Covid-19 has caused big shipping delays for 36% of consumers, the global lockdown made 56% of consumers trying a new retailer during the pandemic period. In addition, of course, this was the biggest holiday season in e-commerce history.On the other hand, more online sales result in more cyber-attacks. Of course, the e-commerce platforms have already started adapting to the current situation, but the hackers apparently took advantage especially at the beginning of the lockdown period, launching an unprecedented number of attacks, aiming to steal the customers’ data, and making unauthorized transactions. Such attacks include credit card frauds, malware, phishing attacks, etc.