COVID didn’t just affect health worldwide, it also affected the cybersecurity of online businesses. While most of the methods were the same, slight modifications to the structure of attacks like phishing attacks led to horrendous results where more than 300% increase in phishing was noted just in the month of April in 2020.
The basics of phishing were still the same – tricking users to share their credentials online – the format was changed into something that had the look of COVID. The two examples that cybersecurity experts have given out are as follows.
- Fake websites with genuine domain names were created as online sellers of sanitizers. Since the look and feel of the websites was genuine and even the DNS redirected to those websites, users ended up filling the financial credentials on those websites to make a purchase.
- Fake emails were created and circulated throughout the medical community. And the worst thing about those emails was that they looked like they were guidelines issued by the WHO.
In both the cases, users clicked on the malicious websites or clicked open the malicious links. And the minute those links were clicked, malware was released in the systems.
In fact, it was also found that many such security vulnerabilities had resulted in an increase in COVID-themed phishing scams by 667% by the end of February 2020.
So, now the question that remains is is it even possible to protect data from such thefts? And the answer to this question is yes. The following 3 advanced cybersecurity techniques have been helping businesses deal better with modern phishing attacks.
- Educating Employees about Phishing Basics
If employees have the basic idea about what phishing is and the fact that it is them who can foil phishing attempts, they will certainly be better prepared. The benefits of this awareness are as follows.
- Employees would know better than clicking on links that come attached with the email body.
- They would understand that they have to report attachments coming from unsolicited sources as soon as possible instead of opening them.
- Make the Use of MFA Mandatory
A strong backdoor password is a wonderful system protection technique. Enabling MFA (multi-factor authentication) on top of that increases the safety even more. When 3 or 4 added security factors have to be cleared to get system access, hackers usually give up on putting in that much effort.
- Using VPN to Scan Remote Devices
VPN or virtual private network should be used to scan the remote systems working on home routers. When the system is scanned, it means that all the traffic that goes to the system is scanned. It helps in ruling out the chances of a potential security breach before the employees get the permission to access the system.
In a nutshell, many cybersecurity practices have been designed so far and many more will be developed in the future. Your only responsibility is to implement those techniques.
