After the lockdown, as most of the company employees around the world were given the opportunity to work remotely to keep their office operations live, a research carried out by Cybersecurity firm Check Point says that the trend witnessed a sharp rise in the volume of cyber attacks as the number surged to 200,000 per week since April 2020.
According to the research carried out by the Israel-based security firm, COVID 19 related phishing and ransomware attacks increased from 5000 per week in Feb 2020 to over 200,000 per week in late April and then again dropped to 10,000 per week by late May when the COVID 19 Pandemic spread was at its peak.
Report says that hackers registered a lot of web domains in the name of Corona virus spread as they were intending to launch various cyber scams through them like selling fake vaccinations in the name of curbing COVID 19 spread and distributing malware to steal banking related credentials.
Also Check Point’s Security report states that there has been an increase in cyber attacks on various video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams since the lockdown was imposed from the last week of March’20 as most of the company employees started working from home.
The most common malware that was detected to be doing the most damage was Emotet that is reported to have affected almost 9% of organizations globally. This said, malware was introduced to the world by hackers in 2014 as a banking Trojan malware and is now known as a distributor of most advanced cyber attacks such as ransomware.
Hope companies that are encouraging remote working trend have taken a note of the cyber threats lurking in the current cyber landscape.
