Learning Objectives:
This article on cybersecurity in 2020 includes:
- A brief overview of COVID-19's impact on businesses
- Information on exposed data (hint: it was record-breaking)
- Threats faced by small and medium-sized businesses
Related Information:
We are only a few short weeks away from the end of 2020. Thank goodness! This year has been…unconventional to say the least, and its impact has been felt on a global scale.
As the year comes to a close, it’s good to take a step back and reflect on all that has happened. This article will examine the various cybersecurity challenges faced over the past 12 months and its impact on small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs).
The Pandemic
2020 will go down in history as the year of the pandemic, as COVID-19 swept businesses into a frenzy. As quarantine mandates were put in place, many businesses found themselves rapidly adapting to a remote workforce. Enabling the technology to power this new work-from-home movement created challenges for IT, security, and compliance personnel, including quickly developing plans to protect sensitive data while ensuring continued compliance with applicable regulatory requirements.
As a part of this transition, businesses relied heavily on cloud services, remote desktop / VPNs, and video conferencing, which placed a high demand on network infrastructure. Naturally, hackers did not skip a beat and quickly capitalized on this opportunity. Phishing, use of stolen credentials, and cloud/web app misconfigurations were the top attack vectors used by hackers during the pandemic, according to Verizon’s Data Breach Report.
Cybersecurity 2020: Data Breaches
With those tactics, along with many others, events occurred. Events turned into incidents, and incidents turned into breaches. As if 2020 wasn’t already bad enough, it also officially set the record for exposed data. With 2,935 publicly reported data breaches in the first nine months, we have seen 36 billion (yes, billion) exposed records. Let that set in for a second.
There was Microsoft with 250 million records. Estee Lauder with 440 million records. Keepnet Labs with 5 billion records. CAM4 with a staggering 10.88 billion records.