The New Cybersecurity Battleground

The New Cybersecurity Battleground

A Tactical Perspective in a Post-Pandemic World


by Tyler Ward, CISSP, MBA, GCIH, GSEC, VP, Security, IGI


The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an influx of new cyber-attacks, trends, and more importantly, perspective. The world has changed in many ways during the pandemic and the effects of this will be long-lasting and will have continued impacts on cybersecurity for the foreseeable future. To calculate the cybersecurity aftermath of the pandemic, we must first delve into the world prior to this crisis to determine what has changed, both temporarily and permanently. In measuring these aspects, the post-pandemic picture can be painted to give us insight into what to expect, avoid, and where to focus.


From the perspective of a military veteran that served in two vastly different war zones, and as a former member of the U.S. national intelligence community, the parallels of a chaotic pandemic situation and wartime offer stark similarities. Looking through this lens, we must compare such battlespaces to that of our new world in order to defend against threats and achieve victory over our adversaries in cyberspace. As many military members can attest, areas that have undergone extreme and abrupt negative changes in social, economic, or government aspects offer new avenues for adversaries to capitalize. The pandemic has also served as this catalyst for cyber-criminals as well. Threat actors leverage times of uncertainty and extreme/abrupt change to stack the deck in their favor. While the public is focused on a “common enemy”, the adversaries will seek to pinpoint weaknesses in defenses while attention is averted to the main public concerns. In this case, cyber-criminals will be exploiting society in ways that that the commercial sector has not yet seen, or at least not to the levels that it will ..

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