Whether you are reading this from somewhere in the United States or overseas, chances are you are doing it from the comfort of your home. Not because you chose to but because you were asked to do so in order to prevent Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) from spreading any further. If you are a parent, working remotely with your kids at home, you are probably facing additional challenges.
Malicious actors are increasingly leveraging COVID-19 as a theme for new digital fraud attacks. In February 2020, for instance, Action Fraud received 21 reports of fraud relating to the coronavirus. This number of reports more than doubled to 46 between March 1 and March 13, 2020. Between March 14 and March 18, 2020, the United Kingdom’s national fraud reporting center collected 38 reports alone. Those 105 reports represented a collective total of £970,000 in losses.
In a previous post, I shared some expert insight into how organizations can address the challenges of hiring skilled talent despite the ongoing infosec skills gap. Organizations can’t rest easy once they’ve brought on new talent, however. They need to make sure they hold onto their existing workforce. That’s easier said than done. Cybersecurity Ventures forecasted that a total of 3.5 million infosec-positions will be unfilled in 2021.
A couple of years ago it felt like you couldn’t turn your head in any direction without seeing another headline about cryptomining and – its more evil sibling – cryptojacking. Countless websites were hijacked, and injected with cryptocurrency-mining code designed to exploit the resources of visiting computers. Victims included the likes of the LA Times, and political fact-checking website Politifact.
The evolution of the cyber threat landscape highlights the emerging need for organizations to strengthen their ability to identify, analyze, and evaluate cyber risks before they evolve into security incidents. Although the terms “patch management” and “vulnerability management” are used as if they are interchangeable, this is not the case. Most are confused because applying patches is one of the many tools that’s available in our arsenal for mitigating cyber risks.
We have seen great strides in improving security tooling and processes over the past ten years. Via constantly maturing security models, security teams have become increasingly dependent upon an ever-more complex toolchain of products and services. But what happens when these systems fail. How much effort are we putting into planning and maintaining our security solutions to ensure they’re available when issues occur?
There’s an interesting trend that I have personally noticed over the past few years: organizations are starting to take cybersecurity more seriously. With the multitude of high-profile data breaches, organizations are starting to realize that cybersecurity is a significant risk to the business. This allows CISOs and other similar titles with leadership responsibilities to have a larger budget for people, process improvements, and supporting technologies.
Security isn’t a simple matter of caring or spending time reading manuals or being told what you can or can’t do. Security is understanding how to view the world from a different perspective. It’s a skill that people build over time, and it’s completely appropriate to start out small. If you can do nothing else, consider the access to your accounts, professional, banking, and social media. Consider how hard a malicious actor needs to work to gain access to these.
First and foremost, our hearts go out to those around the world impacted by the COVID-19 virus. The director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), who advises the country on public health, has indicated that the risk to the general public remains low and encourages Americans to go about their lives. Businesses and local communities are taking a much more personal approach.
Attackers are increasingly exploiting the fact that email gateways turn a blind eye to links to popular sites such as YouTube, in order to phish passwords from unsuspecting computer users. Researcher Ashley Trans of Cofense highlighted the threat in a blog post describing a recent phishing campaign. In the attack, an unsuspecting user receives an email which purports to come from SharePoint, claiming that a new file has been uploaded to his company’s SharePoint site.
