How cybercrime cases increased post pandemic?

Highlights 

• COVID-19 brought a change in the whole world’s working system.
• Cybercriminals are adopting new tactics to attack people working from homes.
• Analysts forecasted global spending on cybersecurity to surge over US$133.7 billion by FY22.

With most organisations being forced to work from home, hackers have been using new tactics to attack people. This is alarming. Many companies are in a constant fear of losing their valuable data with increasing data breaches and cybercrime cases.

Many employees have also been facing a range of technical problems while from working a no-office environment, including inadequate data and cyber security.

Inappropriate cyber and data security are hampering the productivity of various employees in work from home that paving the way for hackers.

Pandemic witnessed cybercriminals switching their tactics to exploit COVID-19 related fears among various individuals, where work from home has become a new gateway to new types of cyberattacks.

Additionally, personal data was the most prevalent information exposed in data breaches, accounting for 44% of all violations. Combining these variables could result in a spiral effect, with data breaches providing attackers with leverage for further data breaches.

Image Source: © Olivier26 | Megapixl.com

image description – Hacker committing cyber crime

What does hacking stats reveal?

As per media reports, more than 60% of the organisations experienced social engineering and phishing attacks in 2019, with only 5% adequately protected companies. One-quarter of all employees noticed a surge in malicious emails, phishing attempts, and spam since the pandemic. 

According to internet security statistics, every 32 seconds, hackers attack someone online, leading to a cybercrime being committed roughly 2,244 times per day. The smaller businesses have suffered the most, with the highest targeted malicious email rate (1/323).

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The rapid shift to remote work has led to major expensive data breaches where each data breach costs over US$1 million on an average. According to various media sources, in 2021, companies have spent around US$4.24 million per breach, which is the highest in the last 17 years. Furthermore, due to increasing cyber-attacks, analysts are predicting global spending on cybersecurity to surge over US$133.7 billion by FY2022.

What are the new ways of cyber-attacks?

In modern days, hackers attack individuals and organisations through different tactics. Let’s look at few of them.

Man-in-the middle attack –

The hacker tracks the communication between two parties to spy the victims to steal their personal data. However, with data encryption, users have some relief.

AI-Powered attacks –

This is the most dangerous tactic used by hackers, as no one knows the capability of such attacks. The most notable AI-powered attack has used slave machines to perform substantial DDoS attacks. 

DDoS attack or Distributed Denial-of-service attack is where a hacker floods a target server in load, attempting to disrupt the target. Such a type of attack can leverage multiple compromised devices to attack the target with traffic. Unlike humans, AI-powered attacks can work 24*7, as they are fast, efficient, and affordable and can efficiently learn various approaches to identify software vulnerabilities quickly.

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IoT-based attacks – 

Devices with IoT or the internet of things are less secure than most modern-day operating systems. It’s also a relatively new concept along with AI or artificial intelligence. As a result, hackers can target security systems, smart thermometers or launch a large-scale DDoS attack.

Bottomline

With game-changing technologies, individuals and various businesses need to be more careful while surfing the internet. Increasing spam or phishing emails require extra attention as hackers are getting more modern with the rise of AI and other advanced technologies.