Hackings Surge Amid Home Office Environment

When the COVID-19 crisis began, companies rushed to get everything in order to send their employees home. The office lights went out and the doors were locked. However, they forgot about cybersecurity on their computers, researchers said. This week ransomware attacks increased 148 percent in March against the previous month, software and security company VMWare Carbon Black said.

“There is a digitally historic event occurring in the background of this pandemic and that is a cybercrime pandemic,” said in a statement VMWare cybersecurity strategist Tom Kellerman. “It is just easier to hack a remote user than it is to hack someone sitting inside their corporate environment. Virtual private networks (VPNs) are not bulletproof”.

According to the report, corporate security teams have a more difficult time protecting data when it is dispersed on home computers with very different configurations and on remotely connected company machines.

Likewise, researchers at Finland’s Arctic Security found that the number of networks experiencing malicious activity was more than double in March in the US and many European countries compared to January. Researchers plan to release their country-by-country findings next week and we will have the opportunity to see what hackers have done in Mexico.