How The Crisis Impacted Businesses Via Cyberattacks

We witnessed a substantial increase in cyber-attacks, during Covid-19 outbreak. Phishing scams and malicious software attacks have become the norm rather than exception across public offices and health care organizations. Thus, industry to work with its enterprises on being more proactive at stopping attacks in the first place, and that involves doing more than just buying and selling a cyber policy that fits the budget and thinking that addresses the risk

- Ashok Pandey

In the current crisis, when the businesses have had to move swiftly to remote working for their employees, security breaches become a bigger concern. Security has taken a back seat for most organizations. As a result, solutions have been provisioned that may not line with risk exposure. Organizations are then exposed to risks that they in normal circumstances would not take.

It has been witnessed that due to COVID-19, there has been a substantial increase in cyberattacks, in the range of 14-20%. These attacks started with Phishing scams, wherein people were receiving phishing emails, where it showed infected maps and it also asked people to download the software and then they become a victim of such attacks.

Malicious software attacks have become the norm rather than exception across public offices and health care organizations. At medical offices and hospitals, there is a huge amount of info available on patients’ medical records. All these are at stake. The healthcare industry is puzzled by the sudden increase in cyberattacks.

As per SonicWall’s 2020 Threat Report, today cybercriminals are no longer interested in the size of the organization but their willingness to pay. In the current scenario, we are seeing sectors like BFSI, Education, Healthcare/ Medical being the major targets. A few case scenarios:

Medical Supply Scam: The scam campaign was targeted towards the medical supply businesses. The mail requested the medical supplier to supply the products specified in the attachment but the attached document is not a pdf file, it is a malicious executable file that belongs to the malware family Agensla. It steals credentials from the victim’s browser, FTP and email clients.