A year ago — everything changed. In an effort to stem the tide of a rapidly spreading pandemic, the world shut down. Shops were forced to shut their doors, and whole countries were placed on stringent lockdowns. Schools were closed around the world, with more than one billion children affected, and the vast majority of companies had to switch to remote work, sometimes with only a week’s notice. As life for large swaths of the population moved entirely online, the cybercriminals were ready.
In fact, not only did the way people lived and worked changed, but so did the methods and tactics used by criminals on the Internet looking to exploit the massive increase in online traffic.
With the approval of several vaccines against the coronavirus, a post-pandemic future is finally in sight. However, there is still a long way to go before life returns to normal, and some changes, such as remote work, look like they are here to stay — as do the new cyber threats that emerged alongside these shifts.
On the anniversary of the global shutdown, Kaspersky experts decided to take a look back at how the threat landscape has evolved since the beginning of the pandemic — and what that means for users in the years to come.
From targeted attacks to exploiting all things COVID-related, the biggest trends in spam and phishing
Phishing is still one of the most effective types of attacks because it exploits users’ emotions, particularly their fear and anxiety. With both of the former heightened thanks to the pandemic, phishing attacks proved to be a highly lucrative attack vector for cybercriminals.
