While many educational institutions and businesses continue to maintain online instruction for the fall due to the pandemic, the FBI warns that the online learning structure will make students and families increasingly vulnerable to cyber-attacks, Border Report details.
This warning comes as the FBI’s Cyber Division experts and Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) division reported a 300 percent increase in cybercrime activity — including a 273 percent increase in “large-scale data breaches” — since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, CNBC News outlines.
A recent report from VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology, corroborates the FBI’s findings.
VMware found that during the time between March and April 2020, ransomware in America increased 90 percent, destructive attacks, in which data or networks are destroyed, increased 102 percent.
Additionally, Island hopping, in which criminals take over digital transformation efforts of companies, using their networks to attack customers and partners, increased by 33 percent.
And, with the increasing need for students and parents to use the internet during the pandemic, many believe these spikes will only go up.
“With school returning, the use of teleconference applications are going to be on the rise, there are some threats that were present several months ago when this first happened with COVID-19,” Tomas Armendariz, a computer scientist with the FBI’s El Paso Division, told Border Report.
“And these threats are going to still be around as people return to class,” he s ..
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