2020 has been a banner year for cybercriminals. They have stolen billions of dollars and data on billions of individuals by preying on widespread fear and uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As we all know, unprecedented numbers of employees are working from home during this pandemic year. In fact, one recent survey by SaaS marketing agency Bay Leaf Digital found that 65 percent of newly WFH employees are now using company devices from home – and 42 percent are experiencing unstable access including issues with connecting to remote desktops, poor VPN, etc.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of cloud services across all industries, but particularly for healthcare providers. If your healthcare organization is considering moving your email from on-premise servers to the cloud, you must do your due diligence around significant security drawbacks that may overshadow the perceived benefits.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a boon for bad actors across the digital landscape. In July, for instance, authorities in the U.S., U.K. and Canada all issued warnings about serious cyberattacks against healthcare organizations and others involved in the coronavirus response. The purpose of these attacks? Theft of intellectual property during the race to develop a vaccine. The tool of choice? Spear-phishing email attacks.
We live in an era where the amount of valuable data businesses must store is increasing at an unprecedented pace. Consequently, the number of cyber criminals trying to gain access to that data is also increasing. In fact, according to a report released last year by Osterman Research, 81% of organizations have been the victim of some type of data breach, targeted email attack, successful phishing attack or other cyber security incident during the previous 12 months. And with the surge of people working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these numbers are only going to go up.
The COVID-19 crisis has changed the way we approach data privacy and email security as the transition to working from home has been accompanied by a growing surge of Coronavirus themed phishing scams and spoofed websites used to distribute malware or lure victims into providing confidential information.
Stories of the COVID-19 pandemic’s rapid global spread have paved the way for threat actors to unleash the most widely-used cyber threat in recent memory.
Despite the rumors announcing the death of email, its use continues to grow. According to research from the Radicati Group, email traffic is predicted to grow to over 333.2 billion emails sent per day (from the current 306.4 billion emails). And as long as businesses continue to use email, cybercriminals will find new ways to exploit security gaps, software bugs, and basic human nature to extort millions of dollars from their victims.
While many businesses are moving their email from on-premises to the cloud, many that have already made the switch have discovered that cloud hosted email has its share of drawbacks to go along with the benefits these businesses had originally sought.
In part one of our three-part series on Business Email Compromise (BEC), I explained what a BEC attack is and provided examples and statistics. As you’ll recall from the examples discussed, businesses have suffered staggering losses to these attacks, and while users are becoming more aware of them, their own human nature dictates that these threats will continue. In fact, a recent report by Get Safe Online indicated that over a third (37%) of employees don’t know what to look for to identify common email scams. The report also stated that one in 20 email fraud victims were so ashamed that they hid their mistakes from their colleagues.
