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Cybersecurity and law enforcement are reporting an 800% increase.
NEW YORK, August 11, 2020 / PRNewswire / – The global pandemic has noticed a massive increase in the number of other people fleeing home, buying groceries online and sometimes being more digitally connected than ever before. There are many clever things that come with it, but there are also many bad things. One of the biggest unrest is that cyberattacks exploded in this period, according to MonsterCloud. Cybercriminals have taken this opportunity to accentuate their attacks, both frequently and in scale. Here’s what you want to know about the accumulation of cyberattacks in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
Cybercrime statistics the pandemic
The numbers are amazing and scary. The FBI recently reported that the number of cyberattack court cases to its cyber department can succeed at up to 4,000 in a day. This represents a 400% increase over what you saw before the coronavirus. Interpol also supports an “alarming rate of cyberattacks targeting giant corporations, governments and critical infrastructure.” These attacks target all kinds of companies, but giant corporations, governments, and critical medical organizations have been the main targets.
Some types of attacks are even more numerous. Microsoft reports that COVID-19-themed attacks, in which cybercriminals have access to a formula through phishing or social engineering attacks, have increased from 20,000 to 30,000 per day in the United States alone. Zohar Pinhasi, a cyber counterterrorism expert and founder of cybersecurity company MonsterCloud, reports that ransomware attacks increase across 800% of the pandemic. Pinhasi told CBS News: “From the point of view of these criminals, this is paradise. They stepped on a gold mine.”
High-level cyberattacks
The overall statistics tell part of the story about the sheer number of cyberattacks. To help understand the size and scope of that these cybercriminals are undertaking, we will take a look at some of the major attacks on huge institutions that have happened during the 2020 pandemic.
Corporate ransomware attacks
Ransomware attacks, in which cybercriminals retain knowledge of their PC or network as hostage until a ransom is paid, have been successful in the pandemic at a point we have never noticed before. The hackers took control of the systems of giant corporations and demanded giant ransoms. The exact amount of knowledge compromised and the ransom payment have not been officially published, but it appears that those attacks were significant.
In early June 2020, Honda announced that its divisions of visitor services and monetary facilities were experiencing technical difficulties and then demonstrated that it was a cyberattack. In July, Garmin users reported widespread outages that the company said was the result of a cyberattack. The attack has been reported to have been the work of the Russian organization Evil Corp. And, in August, Canon was allegedly attacked with a ransomware attack via the Maze ransomware gang, an attack that stole “10 data terathroughtes, personal databases, etc.”
COVID and vaccines
In the early days of the global blockade in the spring, the FBI issued warnings about cybercriminals targeting coronavirus studies. These disorders only proved to be true, but also everything that evolved as the pandemic continued. In July 2020, cybersecurity officials from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada issued a warning about a hacker collective called APT29 and their “efforts to target vaccine studies and progression organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.”
Social engineering Twitter hacking
The maximum known and high-profile attack of the pandemic is the Twitter hack. On July 15, someone took several Twitter accounts from celebrities, business leaders, businesses and politicians and let other people down to send Bitcoin to an account. The attacker hacked into the accounts of others such as Apple, Bill Gates, Kanye West, Elon Musk and even Barack Obama. The scam grossed about $117,000, but eventually led to the arrest of a 17-year-old hacker in Florida.
According to Wall Street Journal reports, the attack was carried out through the writer using a mixture of classic piracy, such as phishing and social engineering sites. The hacker was able to take a cell phone number by convincing an operator to assign a number to a new phone phone (this is called SIM card exchange) and convincing a Twitter worker (who probably worked from home) that he was a Twitter IT worker.
This social engineering allowed the hacker to access sensitive data that allowed him to trigger the attack. It also deserves to serve as a warning to companies that cyberattacks are not 100 percent online. Physical security of data access can be as vital as cybersecurity.
Conclusion
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic has many lasting effects. One of them is that we now know how critical cybersecurity is, especially at a time when we are more vulnerable. That’s why it’s so important in those days to be informed about the most productive tactics for you and your company’s data, and working with cybersecurity professionals is more critical than ever.
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