As the cases of cybercrime see a major spike during the Covid-19 pandemic, The Daily Guardian speaks to Murali Urs, Country Manager, India, Barracuda Networks, a New York Stock Exchange listed company, headquartered in California, dealing with cybersecurity, networking and cloud services. Excerpts:
Q. How do you see the present situation of cybersecurity in India?
A. The Indian cybersecurity services industry, as per a report by Nasscom-DSCI, is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 21% to touch $13.6 billion by 2025. Amid the massive Covid-19 crisis, cybersecurity has been getting even higher attention from enterprises in key verticals like banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), IT and telecom.
The current enterprise security landscape emphasises on trends like email that will be the major threat vector. However, the email and phishing threats faced by organizations today vary greatly in complexity, volume, and the impact they have on businesses and their employees.
Our researchers have been observing a steady increase in the number of Covid19-related spear-phishing attacks since January and the threat is growing rapidly. In fact, phishing campaigns are expected to be responsible for 93% of email breaches as there has been an increase in a variety of phishing campaigns that are taking advantage of the heightened focus on Covid-19 to distribute malware, steal credentials and scam users out of money. The main types of phishing attacks will be spamming, malware, brand impersonation, and business data exfiltration.
Moreover, a report by Gartner states that till 2023, Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks will continue to double each year to over $5 billion and lead to large financial losses for enterprises.
Q. Has the threat perception changed in the last few months because of Covid-19?
A. The pandemic has disrupted business operations and technology initiatives around the world. The most obvious change has been the rapid adoption of SaaS solutions and collaborative tools that were already built for remote workers and off-site IT support. Office 365 and Microsoft Teams adoption has grown quickly as companies adjusted to public health mandates. However, there is no surprise that the bad guys have been opportunists. We saw a lot of innovations made to existing attacks. They started with spam because that is the easiest and then moved on to many sophisticated types of attacks.
Cybercriminals intensified their attack vectors by taking advantage of the widespread discussion of Covid-19 in emails and across the web. Of the nearly 100,000 form-based attacks detected between January 1 and April 30, 2020, Google file sharing and storage websites were used in 65% of attacks, making up 4% of all spearphishing attacks in the first four months of 2020.
Q. How have cyber hackers evolved in the present scenario?
A. Attackers are constantly manipulating people’s fear and uncertainty about the pandemic to launch more sophisticated phishing attacks. The Barracuda research team found a 667% increase in the number of Covid-19-related spearphishing attacks between February and March 2020. These attacks are using new narratives of the current topic of the pandemic in new forms of email threat types such as business email compromise, conversation hijacking and brand impersonation which are the hardest to detect and launch new attacks. This clearly indicates that the work-fromhome culture has increased the vulnerability to the security postures of organizations.
Q. What are some effective cybersecurity measures that one should take to prevent security breaches?
A. Cyber mafias can target any endpoint that is less protected than the usual corporate desktops as distracted remote employees are more vulnerable to accidentally sending sensitive information to the wrong people. While organisations can deploy cloud-enabled, enterprise-grade security solutions to protect their email domain, networks, data and applications, they will have to emphasise on a dedicated culture of security to safeguard all their entry points from the attackers.
To start with, business owners must consider using monitoring or surveillance tools to get better insights and ensure that the employees are adhering to best practices for remote access security. They should investigate the services used by remote workers to send and receive files and sensitive information from clients and get them upgraded. Business owners must also crack down on weak passwords and urge their workers to regularly update their login information. They can also restrict data access to workers for nonessential purposes and deploy an AI-based solution to keep up with the most sophisticated attacks like dangerous hacking vulnerabilities, ransomware, or other malicious activity from a third-party source.
Organisations can also micro-segment their network to build multiple boundaries for the attackers to cross before gaining access to another subset of data. These frontiers are created to only allow the minimum necessary services. Cloud-toCloud Backup is yet another real solution that can change the way organisations protect their data. Finally, user education is important. Organisations must engage their workforce in cybersecurity training, for example, spear-phishing simulation training, so they can track potential dangers in action and transform into a layer of defence. Corporate employees should be encouraged to keep up with ongoing research on current hacking trends and malware so that they eagerly participate in keeping company data secure.
