COVID-19 Impact on Cybersecurity Incidents and How to Prepare for the Future

Due to COVID-19 restricting face to face interactions across the globe, organized fraud operations have been quick to mobilize, targeting spikes in digital activity.

Cyber security incidents are becoming more sophisticated

This pandemic has had a huge Impact on the IT Industry. The International Data Corporation, which is the premier global provider of market intelligence, reports that IT environments are becoming more complex, and cybercriminals are getting better at identifying and targeting weaknesses.

Nearly 40% of IT security specialists have reported that cyber security incidents are becoming more sophisticated, and the increased complexity of managing and supporting security products is more challenging than ever before.  The United States emerged as the top originator of IT security incidents and cyberattacks.

The major spikes in fraudulent activity during lockdowns were largely driven by automation, and recent security incidents are increasing. The current era of digital banking offers lots of benefits to customers, but the evolving technologies increase both the risks of new kinds of information security events happening as well as the effectiveness of potential security solutions.

Experian breach

Due to the increasing amount of automated attacks, cyber security incidents have also risen.  A recent incident is the Experian breach which resulted in 24 million people and around 800k businesses reported their data as stolen.  Another recent cyber security incident is Cognizant Technology Solutions which was hit by a ransomware cyber-attack that resulted in service disruption, and paid a ransom of 70 million to cyber attackers to restore its services.  Twenty-five thousand email addresses and passwords were leaked online that belonged to the World Health Organization, which is one of the major groups working on fighting the coronavirus.

As stay at home orders were put in place, the use of video conferencing increased. One of these popular platforms is Zoom. The Zoom App was another recent cyber security incident which was attacked this year, and people with bad intentions gained access to private meetings, conversations, and managed to share shocking and inappropriate videos. These recent security incidents not only damaged the overall reputation and brand image of the company, but also led to a decrease of platform usage.  Unfortunately, these are only a select few of the recent cyber security events that occurred this year.

Cyber security incidents result in stolen and compromised data and target weak credentials.  Weak credentials are simple passwords in terms of the complexity of the password.  The end result is that the attacker knows or has modified your data.  Other types of cyber security attacks include:

• Phishing,
• Malware,
• Identity theft,
• Identity Cloning,
• and man in the middle. 

You can secure yourself from all of these IT security incidents with our Cyber Threat Protection Solution.

How to prevent IT security incidents

Comarch Smooth Authentication (CSA) is a transparent anti-fraud system that can work on both user workstations and mobile devices to help prevent all types of IT security incidents. Based on the analysis of the users work environment, the system gives you a scoring that serves as a basis for further decisions, such as introducing two-factor authentication, terminating operations, or making a telephone verification.

Cyber Threat Protection modules that help prevent these types of cyber security incidents include:

• Device Reputation,
• Malware detection,
• behavioral biometrics,
• and Identity Cloning.

Key features of CTP include:

• continuous authentication,
• calculating a unique scoring for authorization,
• tracking user and device activity,
• detecting temporary values,
• and having a graphical dashboard for administrators with a threshold tuning functionality based on false-positive events.

This solution is extremely user friendly, comprehensive, and invisible for the end user.  Users can select only the modules which best suite their business cases.  The overall goal for this solution is to combat all types of information security events worldwide.

To ensure your data is safe during these unprecedented times, it is extremely important that you start updating your systems and software on a regular basis when deploying these security measures in your organization.  Assessing your current security position, detecting vulnerabilities, and fixing them quickly will help protect your data from hackers and protect you from all types of IT incidents.  Protecting your data with continuous assessments of your system is crucial and is a key functionality of our Cyber Threat Protection platform. Our CTP solution makes this process seamless and does not require any actions from the user itself as our processor works independently.  The goal here is to make sure that you strengthen your company’s security policy by being proactive and not reactive to combat these types of cyber security incidents.  According to Gartner, you should be spending at least 4-7% of your budget on cyber security.  Now ask yourself: Are you treating this as a high priority in your organization?

Sonya Hamad, Business Development Manager, Comarch