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Abstract

Organisations and individuals have embraced new practices such as social distancing and remote working as a result of the COVID-19 virus which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. Cyber criminals around the world capitalised on the crisis while the entire world focused on the pandemic, in particular the health and economic threats posed by COVID-19.Humans have always been the weakest link in cybersecurity, they are either carrying out the attack or the target of the attack. Individuals are increasingly the targets of two types of attacks: social engineering which seeks to circumvent an existing process and exposes an individual’s lack of security awareness, while exposing obsolete/vulnerable software in a system or technology are the targets of logical engineering. Recent trends, according to cybersecurity statistics and which are also side effects of the global pandemic, reveal a huge increase in hacked and breached data from sources that are increasingly common in the workplace, like mobile and smart devices. Additionally, remote workforce greatly increased, giving room for cyber-attacks. This paper concludes that the pandemic introduced a new variation in cyber-attacks which majorly focused on; security risk from remote working/learning, malicious websites, mobile threats, malicious social media messaging and business email compromise, which might lead to the chances of downloading adware, spyware, ransomware and other malicious software. This paper also recommends that proper awareness on the new gimmicks of cybercriminals is essential inextinguishing the chances of a cyber-attack and possible information breach.

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Keywords

Information security, cybersecurity, pandemic, cyber threats, covid-19.