Cyber-Security During COVID-19 Pandemic
Cybercriminals have preyed on the fear that COVID-19 has brought and have exploited organizations and their employees that are working remotely. They will continue with their attacks so read about what they are and what you can do about them.
What to watch out for
DDOS attacks
Employees working at home do not have a firewall for protection, so they are targeted by Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks. Hackers overwhelm websites with more traffic than the network can handle. Often, these attacks are combined with extortion threats. In 2016, a major DNS experienced a DDOS attack that brought down many well-known companies including Visa, CNN, The New York Times and Amazon.
COVID-19 Phishing Scams
According to Barracuda Networks, phishing emails spiked by over 600% in March. Gmail reported that they blocked 18 million COVID-19 phishing and malware emails during the week of April 6th, 2020. Gmail’s security reports that they block more than 100 million phishing emails every day.
One of the most important things businesses can do is educate their employees on phishing scams and malware. Regular updates on the latest cyberthreats should be communicated. Health organization and governments do not send out COVID-19 emails or text messages with information about COVID-19 or the Coronavirus.
Ransomware
Ransomware attacks have spiked as well. Cybercriminals are threatening to leak compromised data or use it in spam attacks if their ransomware demands are not met. Hackers have struck COVID-19 vaccine centres and even hospitals – they are ruthless. A hospital in Czechoslovakia in the midst of a COVID-19 outbreak. Urgent surgeries were postponed, and acute patients were transferred to another hospital.
Zoom
Be careful if you are conferencing using Zoom – it has many security vulnerabilities including hacking. Over 500,000 Zoom accounts were being sold on the dark web. Cybercriminals are even giving these accounts out for free on hacker forms for zoom bombing. Update to the latest version of Zoom as it has included some fixes to aid in securing sessions. Follow all best practices and change your password regularly.
What you can do about it
Barracuda Networks protects you with multiple layers of protection that includes gateway defense, fraud protection and email resiliency. Barracuda provides advanced security that protects your information with anti-spam filtering and anti-malware.
Multi-factor Authentication
Two factor authentication (2FA) is an authentication method that only grants access after you have provided two or more pieces of evidence that it is you.
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