Months into the COVID-19 pandemic,countless large and small businesses across the globe are operating in survival mode, focused on pushing through the storm.
While companies concentrate on getting through each day and week, one at a time, we would be careless not to encourage them to scrutinize the potential bad actors — specifically, nation-states — that are looking to capitalize on the weaknesses created or exposed by the pandemic.
According to a security vendor Radware, by the end of 2019, over a quarter of companies had experienced a foreign government/nation-state attack. In 2018, 19% of organizations believed they were attacked by a nation-state. That figure increased to 27% in 2019. Before COVID-19, there was already good reason to believe that figure would increase in 2020. It's gone from "if" to "when" to "who." And when it comes to "who," the answer has changed since the reckoning of COVID-19.
While financial institutions, government organizations, and companies working in the political stratosphere have remained popular targets for cyber breaches, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency also warned organizations researching COVID-19 of likely targeting and network compromise by the People's Republic of China. They stated that healthcare, pharmaceutical, and research sectors working on COVID-19 response are the prime targets of this activity and encouraged the industries to take the necessary steps to protect their systems.
CISOs must now look at their businesses through the eyes of nation-state bad actors and see where they fit into the larger picture during and after the recovery stages of the pandemic. This means assessing weaknesses in cybersecurity and addressing them immediately — specifically, old and unpatched weaknesses. In a public disclosure, CISA and the FBI sta ..
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