#COVID19 Forces Positive Long-Term Changes to Cybersecurity

COVID-19 lockdowns around the world have led to an increase in some of the most common attack types, but also a realization that businesses must change going forward, according to over 80% of IT professionals polled by Bitdefender.

The security vendor interviewed 6724 security and IT staff in May across the UK, US, Australia/New Zealand, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark and Sweden, covering all sizes of organization.

Some 86% claimed attacks had increased during lockdown, especially phishing (26%), ransomware (22%), social media threats/chatbots (21%), cyber-warfare (20%), Trojans (20%) and supply chain attacks (19%). In some cases, such as ransomware (31%) and DDoS (36%) the increase in volume of attacks was in the double-digits.

Around a third (34%) of respondents warned that home working employees were too relaxed about security, leading to concerns over phishing (33%) and accidental data leaks (31%). A third claimed home workers aren’t following protocol by identifying and flagging suspicious activity.

Other risks from remote working highlighted by respondents include third parties using corporate laptops and devices (38%) and the use of personal messaging services for work (37%).

Unsurprisingly, half (50%) said they had no contingency plan in place for a scenario such as COVID-19.

However, on the positive side, global organizations are taking proactive steps to improve cybersecurity readiness and resilience going forward.

Over a fifth (22%) said they’ve started providing VPN and made changes to VPN session lengths, 20% have shared cybersecurity guides and deployed pre-approved applications and content filtering, and 19% have updated employee training.

Almost a third (31%) said they intend to keep 24/7 IT support once the pa ..

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