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COVID-19 brings new approaches from attackers

May 14, 2020

Cybercriminals from individual hackers to cybercrime businesses and state-sponsored hacking groups are all taking advantage of COVID-19 and the global impact of the pandemic. They see lots of opportunities, not just for new attacks, but to use well established attacks against people working from home.

The NTT Ltd Global Threat Intelligence Center publishes a monthly report. It looks at the risks that the attacks the GTIC team are seeing unfold around the world. It also provides some guidance on how enterprises can begin to protect themselves. The two most recent reports have focused, as expected, on the threat landscape around COVID-19.

Jon Heimerl, Sr Manager, Threat Intelligence Communication Team at NTT Security

To get a deeper understanding of what is happening and how it affects companies, Enterprise Times talked with Jon Heimerl, Senior Manager, Threat Intelligence Communications Team at NTT Ltd. Heimerl said the scale of the attacks is setting a new reality. “This is the new world we work in, we live in. And we have to face a bigger scale of attacks like this”.

The rush to Work From Home is exposing weaknesses in the way organisations work. This is not just about a lack of technology and planning for remote working. Take BEC attacks that exploit processes not designed for WFH. Heimerl pointed out: “I think it’s a good example of saying how the pandemic has changed the way people work. If I’m working at home now when I used to sit in the office next to my boss, I could walk next door and ask him or I could yell through the wall or whatever made sense.”

Heimerl also talked about how we need to adapt user security training to be “small bites.”

There is also evidence that attackers are going after a wide set of industries but not necessarily exploiting them immediately.

To hear more of what Heimerl had to say, listen to the podcast.