Ever since the pandemic began, Marriott suffered a data breach affecting 5.2 million customers, and a ransomware attack forced Honda to shut down global operations. 2020 will be remembered as an year of a pandemic of global health crisis and cybersecurity as well.
Soon after the COVID-19 pandemic was announced, World Health Organization(WHO) has seen a dramatic increase in the number of cyberattacks directed at its staff, and email scams targeting the public at large.
There are numerous cyber attacks which came into light during this pandemic, Below are a few of them:
- Marriott released a statement disclosing the information of 5.2 million guests that was accessed using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property.
- Twitter Bitcoin scam: Through a social engineering attack, later confirmed by Twitter to be phone phishing, the attackers stole employees’ credentials and gained access to the company’s internal management systems.
- FireEye and SolarWinds supply chain attack.
- 500,000 user accounts of zoom were on sale on the dark web.
- Magellan Health: 8 Magellan Health entities and approximately 365,000 patients were impacted by the attack.
- Finastra, which provides software solutions to worldwide financial institutions, including 90 of the top 100 banks globally, was the victim of a ransomware attack that disrupted operations and caused it to temporarily disconnect affected servers from the internet.
Now some questions to be answered by organizations, Is your organization’s network protection strategy as successful as it ought to be in the midst of these wild occasions? Furthermore, in case you’re not an employee but rather the owner of a private venture – typically someone with much less sophisticated cybersecurity protection – how does your online security is reliable?
The answer could be to accept the ongoing scenario learn lessons and get ready for what is coming. Cyber attacks will keep on occurring in future and a bitter truth is that they will become more sophisticated and critical.
Fireeye in their “Mandiant Security Effectiveness Report” mentioned that:
53% ATTACKS INFILTRATE UNNOTICED, 68% OF RANSOMWARE ATTACKS UNNOTICED, 91% OF ATTACKS DID NOT GENERATE AN ALERT
Organizations, business owners, employees, or individuals need to be aware about data security and privacy. With the surge in wide range of threats, companies should begin by reviewing the basics. Everyone should learn and understand social engineering attacks as humans are the weakest link in cyber security which has no complete patch. Organizations should conduct cybersecurity trainings for their employees on regular basis. Atleast employees should be able to distinguish between malicious and legitimate emails or calls and report them if they seem a bit suspicious, Proper access controls should be put in place too!.