An insight into Emerging Risks present opportunities for the Fraudsters

During these unprecedented times, market conditions are evolving at an accelerated pace. Demand for seamless online convenience gives opportunity to fraudsters who seek out change and disruption. Every enterprise today is a target for aggressive hackers, that is why data security should always be top of mind. It is the time to reimagine your digital identity strategy and prepare for the decade ahead.

With the workplace model shifted to remote working, work devices have now become more vulnerable to cybercrimes and theft. Cybercriminals have been leveraging coronavirus related fears to defraud people and infiltrate systems. According to a news report by WHO, a fivefold increase in cyberattacks has been directed at its staff since the start of the pandemic. There are some 450 active WHO email addresses and passwords were leaked online along with thousands belonging to others working on the novel coronavirus response. This has made it imperative for organizations to ensure their employees are practicing digital hygiene.

As the number of employees working from home have skyrocketed across the globe. This has given rise to newer risks in organizations’ threat landscape. The frequency of phishing attacks have increased significantly during this time. Hackers are leveraging the current crisis to fraudulently direct funds into their accounts or just crash into a system to extract vital data.

Companies must continuously monitor their network and end-user security. Since this should be a round the clock function organizations must use AI-powered automated programs to check the system for irregularities or invasion attempts and prompt the IT teams in real-time to take relevant actions. Technologies such as endpoint detection and response can detect new attacks and attack permutations using machine learning and behavioral analytics.

Technology has allowed users from all over the world to think beyond their geographical borders. In 2020, new start-ups are being launched on 100% remote teams with colleagues scattered all over the world that never meet physically. Forward-thinking businesses are no longer restricting their search for talent to their location as telecommuting becomes the norm. Despite this progress, there is a much darker side to our new online world that is affecting global citizens.

A recent report of Verizon says, 30 percent of recent data breaches were a direct result of the move to web applications and services. Since data is the black gold of the current century and it is much harder to track, govern, and protect, cloud solutions providers need to offer virtual firewalls, network security hardware, and virtual intrusion detection and prevention. However, these are at the intermediate level of security. To ensure end-to-end data protection, along with IaaS cloud solutions providers need to offer Data Security-as-a-Service (DsaaS).

We need to ensure that we have the right skills available to deliver on your transformation vision. This might mean retraining existing staff in areas such as AI, machine learning or cybersecurity or hiring in to ensure that you have the right skills to deliver imperatives of transformation. Or it could mean identifying a partner who can contribute specialist knowledge. But you need to ensure that you have the right team in place to make transformation happen, or you won’t get out of the starting gate. Designing cybersecurity into a transformation from the very start helps control development and operation costs, reduce time to implementation and generate revenue earlier. Moreover, by instituting a common cybersecurity framework for all applications (both on-premises and multi-cloud), the operating costs could be reduced by up to 40%.