Why hackers prevail during a crisis?
There are two events that will shape our memory for the year 2020 in the years to come: the coronavirus pandemic and cybercrime. While we have some information on the root cause of the pandemic, little do we know about the reasons behind the increased activity in cyberspace. This is the first post on a three-post series that will try to shed some light on the reasons why cybercrime become one of the keywords during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this post, I focus on the role of people’s mental situation as an enabler of cybercrime. In the next two posts, I will write from an enterprise and hacker point of view respectively.
Vulnerable people
The coronavirus pandemic has turned our lives upside down. For many of us, a pandemic was something we had barely heard before. Unlike when handling an infection with a computer virus, we were faced with something that we didn’t have an immediate response to.
My way of handling this situation has been similar to the story of most people. In the first weeks of the pandemic, I became an “expert” on nearly everything, from medicine to statistics, geography, politics, and whatnot. I spent a lot of time reading about the pandemic, watching the news, analyzing trends worldwide, and discussing different strategies for handling the crisis. As the weeks passed by, it started to become more clear what it was going to take to end the pandemic. However, living in quarantine and isolation for a long period, and changes in the way we work, socialize, and even think started to represent a challenge to me. I started to hear stories from my friends and family about people losing their jobs, struggling financially, and even losing their loved ones. To make things even worse, I had to spend Christmas and New Year away from my family for the first time ever.
But as we have just entered the year 2021 things are looking promising on multiple fronts. We have vaccines that have been approved and most of the countries have started the vaccination process. While I’m optimistic that this will be the last phase before getting back to normal — whatever that means — sometimes it seems that that day is far on the horizon.
This has been a challenging year for most of us. So, what?
Spear phishing and social engineering remain the preferred methods for cybercriminals. In fact, we have observed a significant increase in such attempts since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. While we will cover the incentive for that in a later post, I will explain here why they are more likely to succeed during a crisis.
The prevalence of phishing attacks comes from the fact that they target people. Unlike many years ago, these attacks today are highly customized to the target and crafted in a way that is not trivial to spot. The Coronavirus has been one of the main themes of phishing attacks over the last year or so. To increase their chance of success, hackers often masqueraded as official from trusted organizations such as the World Health Organization, and provided the targets with something they needed: information! People's fear, uncertainty, emotional, and mental situation as a result of coronavirus have made them more prone to fall for such attacks. Simply, the desire for getting informed along with the lack of security awareness has made people more likely to click a malicious link or download an attachment. This covers all the boxes of a successful attack: relevance, trustworthiness, and a sense of urgency for action. In addition, timing also plays an important factor in the success of a cyber attack. This time, their timing was perfect!
