Cyberattacks on the Rise in Quarantine

Turns out Zoom bombing isn't the only cybersecurity issue that comes with our new normal.

As all things digital have soared, so has hacking activity:

• Attacks on collaboration platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Dropbox are up 300% since February, according to cybersecurity firm Darktrace.
• Between April and June, 31% of video game login attempts were fraudulent—up from 11% last year, per a report cited by the WSJ.
• About 25 percent of all e-commerce transactions were attacked in H1 2020.

Most attacks come from the usual suspects: unchanged passwords, DDoS attacks, phishing scams, and malware.

But... cybersecurity advances mean “hackers have to be more creative in utilizing these old attack measures,” Jerry Irvine, CIO of cloud-based IT firm Prescient Solutions, told us. That means collaboration—e.g., designing automated attacks from large databases of user IDs, passwords, and site vulnerabilities shared on the dark web.

Zoom out: There’s a reason the global AI cybersecurity market is projected to grow from $12 billion in 2020 to $30.5 billion by 2025, according to VynZ Research.

• AI is now used to investigate—not just detect—hacks, using unsupervised and supervised ML and deep learning. (Darktrace’s tool learned from 100+ cyber analysts.)