The Coronavirus Pandemic Establishes The Stage for Hacking

Kade Miller from LinkedIn says: Due to COVID-19 more businesses are turning to remote operations and maintenance. This means more dial-ins from insecure home PC’s and networks and thus more entry points to exploit. In addition, hackers and script-kiddies are staying home from work or school, giving them more time to find network vulnerabilities. It could be the perfect storm so is your control network protected as well as it should be?

Basics to start with:

The novel Coronavirus has definitely impacted daily life and human health around the world. Having this considered there are several companies and government bodies that are now allowing work from home as a mandatory option. With this, it also comes great risk. The risk of hacking during the Coronavirus pandemic. The network all these employees are going to use to connect to their work or VPN. Are those networks really secure?

“This global crisis is an emergent vulnerability in the broadest sense possible,” said Lukasz Olejnik. He is an independent cybersecurity researcher and consultant who has been analyzing the digital security risks posed by the pandemic. “The current situation poses enough challenges. Any additional undesirable events would just make it more difficult. So one worst-case consequence of a cyberattack could be slowing down crisis response, for example in the health care sector.”

Malicious intention for the ones who are taking advantage of the situation:

The Coronavirus Pandemic i.e. Covid-19 scams aren’t just being used by criminals for monetary gain. They’re also showing up in more deceptive operations.

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And then there are the nation-state hackers, who know full well that home networks simply aren’t as secure as those in offices. Remote connections, in particular, make it more difficult, if not impossible. For most threat detection tools to differentiate legitimate work from something suspicious.

“There’s no question that some intelligence agencies are going to take advantage of this,” says Jake Williams. Jake is a former NSA hacker and founder of the security firm Rendition Infosec. “Whatever your baselines are, you’ve probably departed from them now with all of this remote access. So anything you thought you were going to get out of certain tools you’re not going to get anymore. And a lot of times everything, every connection is just lighting up like a Christmas tree. Plus, everybody is just so distracted. It definitely presents an opportunity for attackers to be a little bit noisier and a little more aggressive. I would be very surprised if they don’t take advantage of that.”