The impact of COVID-19 on cyber crime and state-sponsored cyber activities

“In March 2020, governments worldwide imposed curfews and rules” to promote social distancing and flatten the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with these rules came a massive increase in work-from-home, widening companies’ potential attack “surface” with an alarming use of personal electronic devices for work. Intuitively, “increased internet use and working from home heighten digital security risks”; before the pandemic, many companies “enjoy[ed] institutionalized protections” such as managed devices. In contrast, “home networks” lack the same level of security measures and personal computers may be outdated or inadequately hardened against attack. Another unfortunate fact of the pandemic is that it provides “an opportunity to deliberately exploit people’s sense of insecurity, curiosity, or… need for information” to further “malicious activities.” These factors are accompanied by a rise in “virus-related cyber-attacks” as noted by the German Federal Office for Information Security. Many of these attacks have been targeted at “health-care organizations and institutions,” particularly with the use of “ransomware.”
On the “state actor” scale, there has also been an alarming increase in activity from hackers linked to “Russia, China, and North [K]orea,” who are using sophisticated “targeted phishing emails… containing references to the pandemic.” The FBI, additionally, has warned that hackers linked to China (among other parties) are attempting to infiltrate “US institutions that… do research on the… virus.” Some of these attacks are enabled by the change in work habits, such as the adoption of teleconference tools like Zoom. Regardless of the precise method of attack, the pandemic has also made cyberattacks more destructive in that society depends more on the internet than ever before. These factors, especially during the pandemic, make expanding preventative efforts and providing support to remediate cyberattacks especially important.