The Changed Landscape of Cybersecurity During COVID-19 – How Hackers are Exploiting Users and What are the Best Prevention Techniques?

COVID-19 resulted in the change of cybersecurity practices. These changes mainly happened since, suddenly, a lot of businesses switched their offline models on the online platform. And with such an increase, hackers found perfect new opportunities to steal user information and commit financial frauds, affecting people globally. Some of the worst COVID-19 cyber security scams include the following.

• Cyber criminals started circulating a phishing email under the credentials that closely resembled the logo of WHO. Common people who weren’t able to identify it as a phishing scam ended up downloading the link that released a malware on their systems.
• Hackers developed a new botnet, using which they started targeting certain specific IoT devices. The information collected was then used to commit credit card frauds online. 

And these are just a couple of examples. The actual number of ways in which hackers have started circulating phishing attempts is overwhelming. This calls for the need of implementing as many cyber hygiene habits as possible. So, we have dedicated this guide to some such methods that’ll help you in protecting your devices and systems from phishing scams and malware attacks. Have a look! 

1. Use Firewall for Protection

A firewall will increase the chances that your system won’t be exposed to any kind of malware directly. It’s like having a protective wall that has to be breached first if someone wants to gain a forced entry into your house. 

And the firewall software is strong enough to block suspicious websites and also inform you about the dangers of visiting suspicious pages online.

2. Use a Strong Password for Protection

Whether it’s a system that you want to protect or your email accounts on different websites, having a strong password can help significantly in defeating hacking attempts. 

Password Tips for Individual users:

• Make your password at least 8-12 characters long. 
• Don’t use the same password.

Password Tips for Companies: 

• Make sure that all employees use MFA and 2-FA password protection techniques. 
• Make sure that people don’t share their system passwords with each other. 
• Make sure that the router is password protected.

3. Hiring Ethical Hackers

It’s a quite effective method to hire ethical hackers who can identify system vulnerabilities and even help you in patching them up before unethical hackers can discover and misuse them. The method of using ethical hackers is known as bug bounty. And many companies hire them to reduce malware attacks.

These are the 3 best measures that can take care of security concerns arising due to increased malware and phishing threats. 

You can explore much more about such cybersecurity protection techniques here, https://us.hikvision.com/en.