Cyber Security during COVID 19
Cyber Security during COVID 19, The Most difficult time in this era, our generations witnessed, no one could imagine that this time could ever come and we have to face total Lockdown. We know that this type of situation has occurred in the past, but this situation with the Internet in existence is all of the first of its kind.
Has anybody imagined, if the internet would not have been invented, then how would the whole world behave?
So the most important tool is the invention of INTERNET and if the internet was born then some hackers would also have been born 🙂
There comes Cyber Security Domain.
COVID 19 Pandemic came with side effects
- Hampered the Business Continuity of many organization, we all know once business continuity is reset, this sometimes costs organizationsÂ
- Think about Power Plants, Industrial plants, and such large setups which can not take the weight of starting up and shutting down again & again, It Costs for every hour.
- Setup cost to make workforce start working from home, giving them secure devices, high speed internet, we know work from home Networks are Not Secure – they could be a easy entry pointÂ
- Situations where organizations were at the verge of upgrading, what happened to broken systems.
- Systems which were not designed to take loads & cyber secure, what happened to those.
- Some of the basic basic hacking attempts have taken place in our lives have come out vigorously, should be noted that whenever there is a disruption in society these attacks will come out commonly.
These below threats will be very common
- Payment Wallets –Â You will be receiving many Freudian calls, asking you to check messages in which an encrypted url will be seen, as soon as you click on the link fishing attacks starts
- Online ordering system – There are fraudulent websites on which people order online and will use their credit card details on the pages, and then transactions take place.
- Phishing emails – Most number reports coming up since the lockdown. An Attempt to obtain information like usernames, Passwords and other details using emails is actually called as Phishing emails. This type of attempt has been increased due to unrest in governance.
- Malicious App – Whenever you use mobile apps, we sometimes get a message to click on a promotional banner, which might be a message to instal new app.. Now one knows what these apps are capable to get your data and breach our mobile data. These attacks are more common these days.
- Network Endpoints Attacks – There are malware’s on the internet which always keep finding the endpoints which are easily vulnerable and they get infected and penetrate into the system and then live inside the system as a host and wait for their master command further on to start damaging in one form or another.
- Targeting Healthcare Systems at the time of covid – The most important is the healthcare system, this covid19 is a pandemic, most of the people are dependent upon healthcare services and in these times healthcare systems are most common to get attacked.
Cyber Security teams should take the most common steps as mentioned below:
- Online awareness workshop – Most important is increasing awareness in employees working from home.Â
- Backup of all Digital Assets – Digital Assets monitoring tools are becoming very common these days, Organizations should keep regular backups for all digits assets.
- Endpoint Scanning – More and more endpoints increase because people are forced to work from home, hence they are using mobile, ipads, laptops etc in unsecured zones. Hence regular endpoint scanning is necessary.
- Creating Groups, for risks – Immediate Risk mitigation teams should be made, who would be taking care of cyber attacks.
- Excessive use of Tools for monitoring – organizations should start using monitoring tools where you can get reports like Risk Observation, Endpoint Breach, DOS Attack report, Performance & Load Analysis etc.
Lessons from Covid 19 pandemic in reference to cyber security.
- Emergency response teams should get More ActiveÂ
- Immediately activating multi tyre authenticationÂ
- System Performance & Load monitoring, in case situations like sudden traffic rise.
- Cloud Security PreferencesÂ
Summary
This pandemic is the first of its kind, which we have faced in this digital era. COVID 19 will be a perfect case study for future pandemics, the world will be now more prepared for these disasters.Some of the factors like how the digital industry behaves, all of a sudden change, immediate load and performance issues, systems scalability, penetration test, cyber attacks etc. Systems which fell or broke easily in this would be a great learning or case study for future.
Relevant Links
INFORMATION SECURITY-KNOW WHAT COMPLIANCE YOUR ORGANIZATION NEED