Cybercrime has significantly increased every year, which is directly proportional to the growth of technology. Factors attributed to this increase could be summed up due to the perpetrators’ persistent behaviour through new tactics like using Covid19 as theme and sophisticated applications. Cybercriminals are being backed up by governments and the victim’s open vulnerability. Different sectors are simultaneously being attacked from production, educational, military, and most of all, the perpetrators’ favourite – financial institution.
Due to the fast spread of infection and deadly result of the virus, more companies have shifted to continue their operations through remote access to secure their employees’ health and aid in containing the virus. However, with this drastic change, most companies have agreed that their remote security cannot cope with the required security level. Hence, this has invited perpetrators to exploit this weakness. Our home network is not adequately equipped with the same security level imposed in the corporate network. Adding to the management’s poor awareness drive about new and known cybercrime, not to mention that perpetrators can customize and create a sophisticated application through collaboration with other adversaries, the success rate of intrusion is highly anticipated as a result.
According to statistics, since the pandemic started from February to April 2020 a relatively almost 300 per cent increase of attacks has been reported from the financial services sector alone compared to the same period in 2019 and in other previous years. The issue with Covid19 is considered to fuel more perpetrators to be more persistent in doing their deeds. Cybersecurity authorities confirmed that perpetrators have explicitly exploited themes relating to Covid19 to lure their victims to do their act. Later on, gaining access to the user devices that will compromise the victim’s sensitive information and worst will be the perpetrator’s gateway to infiltrate the host victim’s affiliated company. The struggle to keep the operation will be a real burden to the company, leading to a sad story.
The financial institution has seen and experienced most of the attack compared to other sectors.
Reports of numerous ransomware attacks, data leakage, a compromised website, and persistent mage cart attacks were on top of the type of attacks that perpetrators performed benefitting from the Covid19 news.
Attacks were delivered primarily via spear-phishing emails, compromised IoT devices, exploiting system vulnerabilities, and few percentages on smishing and vishing activity.
This is now a defined global problem that will not be resolved of a mere patch but with a rigorous approach from all individuals with the aid of various sectors strengthening imposed security and proper information dissemination of such malicious activity’s cause and effect. Immediate long-term action is highly needed to counter such attacks. Else, the sustainability and growth of a company will be threatened. Without the required resolution money loss and reputation damage are inevitable.
