Daily Post 1336
IS WORKING FROM HOME A CYBER SECURITY RISK?
For the naive and uninitiated, cyber security was never a concern and in the digitally totally transformed Corona times, might be he would have heard just of Zoombombing. While we are busy with the known vulnerabilities of Zoom, the efforts to patch and the advisory against it, this happens to be a very small percentage of the cyber breaches, which are on an increase. With the world shifting its work and education to home this was more than expected. As per a Verizon report ransomware attacks are exploding in the education sector, across educational services.
This surge is witnessed globally in 2020. Suffice to say that most of this year, the world has lived in lockdown and the likelihood of schools and colleges reopening anytime soon is still thin. According to Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigation Report, there is clear trend of the hackers opting for ransomware attack, which this year is accounting for 80% of all the cyberattacks suffered. The data collated suggests that the vast majority, 92% are motivated by financial reasons and a meagre 3% is for espionage on businesses operating within education.
Though growing at an alarming rate, ransomware was just 48% of the whole in 2019. Phishing is partially to be blamed, the ransomware attacks are more commonly made through fake websites than through emails. Given the present professionalism in this game and the crash commercialisation of crime, the hackers can rent out the malicious software as service. Verizon states that even now considerable number of companies don’t have protection against ransomware, that too explains for this increase.
Casey Ellis, founder & CTO, Bugcrowd speaking to Cointelegraph said many companies are vulnerable to the rise of ransomware in the COVID-19 age. More targeted attacks are expected against remote working employees, in general parlance, work from home. ”Attackers will capitalize on vulnerabilities in the outside perimeter, allowing more effective and destructive phishing attacks, such as subdomain takeovers, due to high amount of rushed domain and configuration changes.” Mostly ransomware would be executed by publicly known vulnerabilities, Ellis does expect to witness an increase in sophisticated attacks across industries.
WHILE IN LOCKDOWN, YOU ARE NOT LOCKED OUT FOR HACKER.