Q3 Cyberattacks and Trends: Social Engineering Takes the Upper Hand
COVID-19 strikes almost everything in the world, and the cybersecurity field is not an exclusion. Observing the Q3 events and incidents makes obvious the fact that Coronavirus has cardinally changed the world’s cybersecurity landscape and these changes look irreversible for the nearest future. More of that, these new trends seem to be able to distinguish the whole manner of the attackers around the world.
Cybercriminals always follow the money and flexibly react to any changes in the business community. COVID-19 forced
an unprecedented number of companies around the world to allow their employees to work remotely. Because the companies had to do it all of a sudden, they were not ready to provide the appropriate security level of this process. And as the vast majority of staff members in most companies were not aware of cybersecurity issues and techniques, they became the easy-to-hit marks for cybercriminals right off the bat.
The employees started connecting to their companies’ networks from their own laptops and desktops that in many cases even didn’t have an antivirus installed. For attackers worldwide, this situation opened up an unprecedented chance to successfully penetrate networks all over the world.
The process of such an attack is not much complicated. Attackers send out a bunch of phishing or spear-phishing emails with a malicious payload, usually disguised as legitimate Word or .pdf document. When a victim runs the file, her computer gets infected (often with a shell-based backdoor). Thus, the attackers take control of the victim’s computer and turn it into a gateway to the company network.
Got interested? Download and read the full version of DIESEC’s Q3 2020 Cybersecurity Review in .pdf to find out the new ways cybercriminals have invented to attack your assets anytime soon.