In the fast-paced, digitally-driven world of today, individuals who are well-versed in cybersecurity principles still find themselves vulnerable to online threats. A crucial yet often overlooked aspect is the impact of stress and distraction on one’s ability to recognise and respond to cyber threats, particularly phishing emails. Even those who have undergone comprehensive security awareness training are not immune to this phenomenon.
These days, most people are aware that cybercrime is a very real and ever-increasing threat. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many workers were forced to work remotely for the first time, from their bedrooms, living rooms and kitchen. Terms like ‘phishing’ and ‘ransomware’ are now frequently seen and heard, but there is another type of threat that has seen a huge increase in frequency in 2020 – Business Email Compromise.
Earlier this month, Microsoft threat analysts released an alert in a blog post warning organisations of a new attack vector being used to deploy malware.
As the saying goes, there’s no rest for the wicked. Just a few months after behemoth IT management solutions provider SolarWinds was the victim of a major cyber attack, IT professionals across the globe are scrambling to patch their Exchange servers against a new zero-day exploit.
Earlier this month, it was announced that hundreds of thousands of organisations (at least 30,000 in the US alone) had potentially been compromised by a group called Hafnium, who are based out of China and believed to be state-sponsored.
IT management software giant Solarwinds were the victims of what is believed to be one of the largest cyber attacks yet late last year, sending shivers down the spine of much of the tech world. The attack breached SolarWinds monitoring tool Orion, which allowed the hackers to deliver malicious updates to unsuspecting users of the tool for several months.
Now, two months after the breach was discovered, an alarming number of SolarWinds customers still have vulnerable Orion servers exposed to the internet.
