Every year, our anti-malware research team releases a series of reports on various cyberthreats: financial malware, web attacks, exploits, etc. As we monitor the increase, or decrease, in the number of certain threats, we do not usually associate these changes with concurrent world events – unless these events have a direct relation to the cyberthreats, that is: for example, the closure of a large botnet and arrest of its owners result in a decrease in web attacks.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected us all in some way, so it would be surprising if cybercriminals were an exception. Spammers and phishers were naturally the trailblazers in this – look for details in the next quarterly report – but the entire cybercrime landscape has changed in the last few months. Before we discuss the subject, let us get something out of the way: it would be farfetched to attribute all of the changes mentioned below to the pandemic. However, certain connections can be traced.
Remote work
The first thing that caught our attention was remote work. From an information security standpoint, an employee within the office network and an employee connecting to the same network from home are two completely different users. It seems cybercriminals share this view, as the number of attacks on servers and remote access tools has increased as their usage has grown. In particular, the average daily number of bruteforce attacks on database servers in April 2020 was up by 23% from January.
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