"Mimcast": 48% growth in cyber threats during the "Corona" pandemic

The "Mime Cast Limited", an international company specialized in the field of enhancing e-mail security, revealed that the data it monitored indicates an increase in the rates of cyber attacks by 48% during the first year of the Corona pandemic between March 2020 and February 2021, with a similar increase in rates. Infection with the Covid-19 virus in April and October 2020 ", pointing out through its new global report" The Year of Social Distancing. "It launched today, to investigate the threats to the increasing targeting of remote workers during the pandemic.

"The attackers took advantage of the pandemic conditions to unleash a wave of social engineering attacks bearing the character of Covid-19," said Josh Douglas, Vice President of Product Management at MimeCast, based on their understanding of the pressures people are subjected to at work from home and that they are more likely to be deceived and committed. The second part of the strategy was to flood the security operations centers, as they knew that the analysts would be subjected to severe pressure in their work, and thus drowning them with an enormous number of attacks would likely lead to the success of a number of their attacks to pass without being blocked in the defense lines.

Douglas said: "We are now witnessing complex digital fraud campaigns in which attackers combine the social engineering associated with the Coronavirus with multi-channel campaigns - such as email, social media channels and even the phone - to gain credibility with those targeted so that they can be deceived into giving valuable or even confidential information. We expect this to continue." The challenging and threatening environment in the near future as employees move to the new normal - which in many jobs will be combined between work from home and office. It is important for organizations to take effective steps to confront these digital fraud campaigns by enhancing employee awareness, given that they are the most prominent target. , Through training programs for cybersecurity and securing the infrastructure in the new virtual workplace, especially e-mail and participatory work tools.

The report also examines the cyber habits of home workers, which revealed some alarming facts, including:  

• A 3-fold increase in clicking on unsafe links in March 2020, that is, once you go to work from home

• In the UAE, 61% of respondents admitted that they open suspicious e-mails while 50% said that they do not report suspicious e-mails to their IT security teams.

• 87% of the respondents from the UAE use the devices that the company owns for personal matters, as two-thirds (66%) said that the frequency of such behavior has increased since starting work from home.

Follow our latest local and sports news, and the latest political and economic developments via Google news