Cyber Security Attacks Increases With Coronavirus Outbreak In India: Report

Coronavirus outbreak has forced the Indian Government to impose a complete lockdown situation across the country. All the tech companies are facing huge loss and employees are working from home. Amid this crisis, security researchers at Check Point have come up with a study through Dimensional Research.

It has conducted a study on 411 IT and security professions. All these organizations have more than 500 people and the study is conducted to analyse the severity of coronavirus impact on the security of the organizations.

According to the research, the rapid change in the working practises has increased the security risk, the cybercriminal is more active now and they have stepped up their attacks, "generating a raft of new challenges for security professionals," reads the report.

According to the study, the enterprise Coronavirus-related attacks have seen a jump, "71 percent of security professionals reported an increase in security threats or attacks since the beginning of the Coronavirus outbreak."

Phishing attempts increased by 55 percent, malicious websites claiming to offer information or advice about the pandemic increased by 32 percent. Malware and ransomware attacks increased by 28-19 percent.

Managing Remote Work is Hard

The Check Point study stated that 95 percent respondents are facing IT security issues because of the epidemic.

The three leading challenges are:

• Provision of secure remote access for employees (cited by 56%)
• Need for remote access scalable solutions (55%)
• Employees working from home were using shadow IT solutions - untested software, tools and services (47%)

On an average 2,600 coronavirus-related cyber-attacks are occurring every day. Check Point also confirmed that it sees, "Over 30,103 new coronavirus-related domains have been registered in last 2 weeks."

Out of these 131 are malicious and 2,777 are suspicious and more than 51,000 coronavirus-related domains have been registered since the start of coronavirus pandemic.

The study also claimed that Zoom is also vulnerable and employees who are working from home and using Zoom can be attacked by the hackers. The report suggests that the numbers of Zoom domains registered and spotted malicious have increased

How To Stay Safe From Cyber Attacks

• Enterprises should secure their remote workers by installing VPN software and endpoint threat prevention.
• Educate employees about phishing emails and the risks related to spam and phishing emails
• Be aware of misspellings in URLs and better understand how fake websites are used to lure people into sharing their personal information.