COVID-19 is forcing business leaders to adapt operating models faster than ever before to ensure existential survival. The large-scale adoption of work-from-home technologies, exponentially greater use of cloud services and explosion of connectivity allow companies to continue operations even with social distancing and “stay at home” orders.
However, the paradigm shift is putting immense pressure on cybersecurity operations. As organizations are making extraordinary efforts to protect their workers and serve their customers during the pandemic, exposure to cyberthreats is increasing significantly.
Cybersecurity operations are facing tremendous challenges:
- Working from home has opened multiple vectors for cyberattacks through the heightened dependency on personal devices and home networks.
- Social engineering tactics are even more effective on a distracted and vulnerable workforce.
- Security Operations Centers (SOCs) have been designed to look for anomalous behaviors; today, SOCs are operating with impaired visibility because everything looks anomalous.
- Critical business assets and functions are significantly more exposed to opportunistic and targeted cyberattacks by criminal organizations and nation states seeking to exploit vulnerabilities and plant seeds for future attacks.
- Public-sector services such as hospitals and healthcare services are under acute pressure and have been hit particularly hard by new types of ransomware aimed at disrupting connectivity and denial-of-service attacks.
- The security and privacy flaws discovered on the popular Zoom video conferencing application are a reminder that innovative entrepreneurs and businesses both have a role to play in reducing exposure to cyberattacks.
Security bugs and privacy-abusing practices are not new, but have been exacerbated by the growing demand for cost-effective and just-in-time solutions, along with the pressure to digitize and innovate quickly to keep ahead of competition, increase operational efficiencies, improve customer experience and improve business decisions with enhanced analytics.
Read more at the World Economic Forum
