The lock down has clearly increased workloads to remote, cloud and hybrid environments. The cyber-attacks have just been growing steadily and relentlessly. New victims every day and by the time the impact is understood there is a new ransomware, a new victim impacting organizations across the world. It looks like the hackers are far ahead in the game.
The four popular brothers -phishing, malware, ransomwares, and DDOS seem to be doing just fine and growing well. While the work has moved to home, by and large organizations have really not checked if the employees work in a safe environment, not physically but from network security, I have not heard of anything other than a VPN and in some cases everything is left to “it is someone else’s problem to solve “.
Let’s take the last few big take downs- Solar Winds, FireEye, Software AG, Paytm, easyJet, Marriot all have been victims, these are companies with skilled people and mature environments. So it’s really not the small business that is being attacked.
The hacker world has its own hall of fame, anything small is not going to get any attention in that world and more audacious the attack better the score. These are coveted spots you earn which keep the methods and game interesting by outdoing each other, new players emerge and join the club. Earlier we had Babuk ransomware which attacked Houston Rockets, a telecom company and Govt dept. all in a single month.
The lights on approach of folks manning the security networks, the talent gap and no updated policies are just adding to the vulnerabilities.