Shane Chambers No Comments

Phishing Scams, Corona Anti-Virus, Free Ransomware Decryption & More: Cybercrime in the Era of Covid19

These are undoubtedly strange times we are living in, with unprecedented changes taking place in our lives all over the globe in order to fight the pandemic that is Covid19. Suddenly, a sizeable chunk of the workforce is working from home, in many cases for the first time. Companies are scrambling to put in place plans to accommodate this, working out whether to allow users to use their own devices, or provide company laptops or desktops for any displaced staff. Moreover, many people are out of work altogether and confined to their homes, spending significantly more time than usual browsing the internet, looking for the next clue online that will bring some certainty to their lives around the crisis they are living through.

With such a shift in online activity comes great challenges for technology companies and IT teams in ensuring their users are safe and their precious company data is secure – meanwhile cyber criminals have seen crisis as opportunity; the misfortune of others is a chance for them to take advantage of the confusion and make some extra money.

Ransomware has crippled various hospitals in the past, including many NHS Trust hospitals which were caught out by the infamous 2017 WannaCry attack.

The Covid19 pandemic is the perfect storm for cyber criminals to up the ante. Confusion reigns among users and misinformation is rife. Users who would normally be at work are now accessing the internet from home devices, which typically are not sitting behind the advanced firewalls, email filters and policies put in place by their organisations to protect them against malicious activity.

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Shane Chambers No Comments

As GDPR Looms – Cyber Criminals Move Towards Business Extortion

Trend Micro, one of the largest cyber security firms in the world, has released their annual security roundup report, and the results show some alarming trends. With the GDPR upcoming, cyber criminals have been refining their techniques in order to increase their financial gains, moving away from exploit kits which can be an unpredictable earner, to more reliable tactics such as business email compromise, phishing and spam, ransomware, and the relatively new threat to businesses, malicious crypto-currency mining.


Exploits kits are down, but 2017 saw over 300 new ransomware families, in addition to a rise in business email compromise scams and the all-new malicious crypto-mining threat.

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