While the world struggles with the impacts of COVID-19, cybercriminals see it as an opportunity. Since February, IBM X-Force has observed a 4,300 percent increase in coronavirus-themed spam. While organizations worry about newly pressing concerns—workforce well-being, shift to remote work, finance availability, and the resiliency of operations and supply chains—cybersecurity focus is being overshadowed and risks are rising.
The tendency toward ad hoc decision making during crisis only accelerates the opportunity to exfiltrate data or compromise business operations. The potential impacts are more dangerous, too. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, for instance, can be far more damaging in an operational environment that is already strained for capacity than one launched when additional capacity is readily available.
Security leaders from SMBs to large enterprises need to continue their focus on the entire threat lifecycle which constitutes planning and detection, in-the-moment response and remediation –recovery. This will help to prepare for additional unforeseen scenarios.
Prashant Bhatkal, Security Software Leader, IBM India South Asia, says, “As an organization we have been working with our clients even before the pandemic to build their Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan. With COVID-19, organizations who were prepared managed to sail through while organizations that were insufficiently prepared in normal times have been caught completely off guard. With threat landscape evolving every day and work from home being the new normal, threat actors are finding newer ways to disrupt businesses. Clients today are looking for CyberTech which can help protect their data, provide end-to-end security across multiple environments, new authentication methods, monitoring services and most importantly re-imagine their risk assessment.”
They have identified 5 CyberTech trends which will help security experts maintain constant vigilance and organizational agility across sectors like Manufacturing, BFSI, Telecom, Government, Healthcare, Auto, Retail etc.
