In 2020, Cybersecurity has become more important than ever for businesses all over the world. The COVID-19 Pandemic definitely left a huge impact on the overall cybersecurity situation. No one is immune.
Global lockdowns forced many companies to shift to remote work. Cybercriminals took advantage of vulnerable home networks. Many organizations encountered data breaches at the beginning of the work-from-home shift. For instance:
Healthcare and financial industries were the most affected, as they deal with huge amounts of personal data. For instance, various research shows that:
On the flip side, 2020 has definitely been a good year for online retailers. Even though according to surveys, COVID-19 caused big shipping delays for 36% of consumers, the global lockdown made 56% of consumers try out a new retailer during the pandemic period. In addition, of course, this was the biggest holiday season in e-commerce history.
On the other hand, more online sales resulted in more cyber-attacks. Of course, the e-commerce platforms have already started adapting to the current situation, but the hackers apparently took advantage especially at the beginning of the lockdown period, launching an unprecedented number of attacks, aiming to steal customer data, and making unauthorized transactions. Such attacks include credit card fraud, malware, phishing attacks, etc.
Even though businesses are trying to adapt to the growing threat from cybercriminals, cybersecurity specialists are not optimistic at all, as their research shows that cybercriminals are changing their way of acting even more, and are not planning to slow down. Here are just some figures and predictions for 2021, presented by Cybersecurity Ventures:
Taking into account the aforementioned statistics and predictions, it is obvious that organizations and individuals must completely rethink their cybersecurity approaches and strategies. So what can we all do to combat cybercrime more effectively?
It has been proven that 90% of cyber-attacks are related to human error. Often people take cybersecurity for granted, and most employees are not even aware of cyber-attack types and risks…until it is too late. Any employee who is not well-informed about cybersecurity can unwillingly fall victim to cyber-attacks, placing the company and clients at risk. That’s why it is crucial to educate the employees, especially today when many of them are working from home.
So start spreading cybersecurity awareness right now: provide your employees with all the necessary information concerning cyber threats and resulting bad consequences and organize cybersecurity training sessions and phishing experiments. Stay in control of the process: make your employees use only secure software and strong passwords, explain to them why they should get the approval of the IT department before installing any software, and why they might have limited access to some data, in some cases.
Preventing any damage is always better than repairing it. Cybercriminals will constantly search the weak points in your company’s cybersecurity infrastructure which is why you always have to be ahead of them, detecting an attack before it happens. This way of thinking will help reduce damage and avoid major problems. Take all the necessary precautions to ensure your data is protected.
Research shows that many companies don’t have back-up plans and tactics in case of attackers succeed in stealing their data.
But how to make sure that the data stored on your computers and cloud services is really protected…even if stolen? The answer is simple. Make it useless for the thieves!
As we have seen, following all the figures listed above, your data is ultra-protected not when it cannot be breached (because it always can), but when it cannot be read by unauthorized users.
and fragmentation to render data useless to unauthorized users and protects your data no matter where it is stored. It is called Fragglestorm™.Contact us for more information about Fragglestorm!
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