Digital Infrastructure Use Cases: Distributed Security

Since the beginning of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the cyberattack field has greatly expanded at the edge. One of the key factors in this increase was the large number of companies that had to quickly build network capacity to cater to increasing volumes of remote worker data traffic. And with that rise came many more insecure access points at the edge, such as 'bring your own device' home computers, laptops or other mobile devices that were not sanitized for corporate use. Most breaches tend to originate with employees inadvertently making their corporate passwords accessible. In addition, remote workers accessing corporate systems via the public internet or legacy VPNs not reinforced for high volumes of traffic, made it harder for businesses to lock things down from threats.

Another common attack ploy during the pandemic has been phishing schemes. For example, researchers from the Cisco Umbrella team checked into the increase in malicious domains that bad actors used to carry out cyberattacks at the beginning of the pandemic. The researchers' results showed that between March 19, 2020 and May 19, 2020, the number of domains enterprise customers accessed that contained 'covid' or 'corona' in the name rose from 47,059 to 71,286. In March 2020, 4% of those domains were blocked as 'malicious,' however, by May that number had increased to 34%.