How To Avoid Cyber Attacks In Quarantine?

As a consequence of the quarantine due to the coronavirus, there are many more people connected working from home and with access to more information from the web, the cybercriminal takes advantage of this and manages to adapt his cyberattacks to the occasion.

Techniques Used By Cybercriminals

Social Engineering:

Large companies are more protected than SMEs, which do not have as many resources. The cybercriminals know which companies are working from home and communicate with those employees impersonating the service requesting passwords and personal data, saying they have to do maintenance. They pose as company technicians.

Pishing:

It is the preferred technique at the moment, they impersonate official accounts of the Ministry of Health and create email accounts and web pages that are confused with the official ones, which makes the user also confused, and thus they can commit their frauds.

They pose as the Ministry of Health and the purpose is for the recipients to click on a link to access the new health indications. In this way, personal data is stolen.

They do the same with the WHO, asking for donations, to steal money or personal data. They also create campaigns attaching files with recommendations about the coronavirus, taking advantage of the anguish of the employees at the moment they are living, and they are opened without precaution and infect the user’s equipment.

INCIBE advises that an illegitimate collection of health data has been detected. “Cybercriminals create type pages to check if you have a coronavirus or verify that your area is virus free to keep the data”

According to Check Point Threat Intelligence, since January, more than 4,000 coronavirus– related domains have been registered worldwide. 3% of them are malicious. Those related to the coronavirus are 50% more likely to be malicious than others registered in the same period.

Disinformation :

In many cases, the Dissemination of these pages is done by the user through messages, wanting to be the first to inform the WhatsApp group and he does not stop to think if it is false information. As there is so much information at any given time and it changes from one moment to the next, it is easy to access links that are known without knowing if they are reliable or not.

The cybercriminals create alarmist news that leads to fraudulent websites, for example, supermarkets have run out of food, users react to this information because of the situation we are living in the trap and fall more easily.

Ransomware:

Ransomware attacks, this time, are directed more towards critical infrastructures, than users.

A hospital was attacked by cybercriminals, hijacked computer systems, and asked for money in exchange for releasing them. They pressed the payment using the coronavirus situation.

This hospital center is one of the largest Covid-19 testing laboratories in the country, and due to the incident, which was not minor, urgent surgical interventions were postponed and patients had to be redirected to other health centers.

Vulnerability at this time is not because of the number of people connected, but because there are many people working from home without the appropriate security measures.

To secure telecommute, large companies provide their employees with VPN connections, update devices, and maintain equipment with adequate security measures. This cannot be done by some SMEs, due to not having the necessary resources.

At this time, the greatest vulnerability is due to the misinformation of users and little prevention and awareness about cybersecurity.

Do You Think Virtual Communication Secure?

Many times we connect through video calls or send photos to the group and we do not notice if we are showing our house or details of our privacy, such as family photos or from the balcony of our apartment, giving personal data, etc … that for a Cybercriminal is information that you can use against us through a cyber attack.

The advice of the experts is that before publishing something on the networks, you have to think about what I am going to publish and who will see it.

For example, if you upload a photo from your balcony it will be very easy to know where you live or if you are recording a video in the living room and a photo of the family appears, it will be possible to know your marital status and if you have children and pets.

The key question to ask yourself before uploading something to the networks is: do I want people to know that information about me? As for advice from the experts, you should choose a place in the house that does not expose aspects of your privacy and keep in mind the privacy settings.

The more information we provide about ourselves, the easier it is for cybercriminals to attack.

This does not mean that we should not communicate virtually, on the contrary, it is good to do it because of our state of mind and the stress generated by the crisis. You just have to be careful and maintain privacy.

How To Avoid Cyber-Attacks?

Cybercriminals adapted their attacks to today’s contingency, the coronavirus. They always adapt to what is happening at the moment, now they even use people’s suffering and fear to commit their cyberattacks. They adapt to any type of crisis.

They have also taken advantage of the fact that companies have had to send their employees to work from home, from one day to the next, without having time to prepare all the necessary security measures. This makes the vulnerabilities greater.

They use all kinds of techniques to achieve their objectives and it is easier to fall right now due to the crisis situation that is being experienced.

Despite all the inconveniences that may arise to work safely, we must try to protect our computers and our information from cyber attacks: updating the operating system, having antivirus, not opening suspicious emails, not entering unsafe or unknown pages and from the households use VPN connections. Better be safe than sorry.