Sensitive Data are in Danger During the COVID Pandemic

The coronavirus epidemic caught the whole world off guard and caused significant changes in many businesses. Since most of the work process is conducted at home, the overall durability of endpoint and network securities is weakened. Cyber attackers can scan the vulnerabilities of remote workers that access sensitive information easier now. Therefore, companies that do not want to lose their data and suffer a major loss should care about cyber threats more than ever.

Eventually, BugBounter.com warns CSOs, CIOs and CISOs to demand greater attention from their senior executives. A Kaspersky research states that DDoS attacks increased by 217 percent in the second quarter of 2020 during the pandemic, compared to the same period last year.

In addition, FBI announced that the cyber attack complaint from the Cyber Unit increased by 400 percent. According to the “Catching the virus” research conducted by Europol, cybercrime is on the list as the type of crime whose activity has increased the most with COVID-19.

Cyber threats like malicious codes & software and ransomware attacks are much more frequent now. So, as the Chief information security officers are responsible for data breaches during covid-19 pandemic, they are the biggest trump card against these attacks that can cause great damage to companies.

Four Topics To Watch Out While Working Remotely

The lesser the attention given to cybersecurity, the higher the vulnerability cyber attackers can exploit. There is a lot of sensitive data to protect and even more types of attackers are after them. BugBounter addresses four critical issues that cause companies to get hacked during work from home.

1.Human error must be taken into account

All employees can make mistakes. Since direct communication is forcibly abandoned, possibilities of human error have increased. Yet, with every mistake, an area where cyber attackers can infiltrate opens up.

Not only that, sometimes while patching a security vulnerability, a new vulnerability may be unknowingly created. Although tightly controlled security tools are used, companies need to develop effective methods for quickly detecting a potential problem, taking into account human error.

2.Low number of cyber security experts

Today, there are advanced cyber security systems that offer agile defense in many areas. However, all these systems are also limited to the operating team’s own capabilities since someone needs to implement and manage them.

Unfortunately, the number of cybersecurity experts with the necessary competencies to maximize the performance of these systems is not enough. Besides, they need to develop better cooperation among themselves compared to non-pandemic times. Cybercriminals are aware of this situation and continue to work to exploit these systems, where they can discover their weaknesses quickly.

3.Cybercriminals need less

While cybersecurity professionals try to protect their systems from attacks with the responsibility of patching all vulnerabilities, cybercriminals only need one. Given enough time, even the most secure systems can be exploited by skilled cybercriminals.

That’s why responsiveness and versatility of the companies against the reported security vulnerabilities are also crucial. For example, BugBounter returns to the reports reported at this point within a maximum of 2 days, verifies the report within 3 days, and completes and verifies the patch within 30 days. This opportunity to take quick action is vital in the times of a pandemic.

4.Information on the dark side of the cyber world is limited

The fact that transactions are happening faster than people can follow is one of the biggest challenges in the cyber world. Today, they have reached the speed of light due to the volatility brought by COVID-19. Thus, many things happening within the networks can remain hidden.

For example, phishing email is quite common and infiltration of an e-mail account can easily stay undetected. It’s important for security analytics solutions to showcase what to notice, and companies should better acknowledge what to care for.

The Bug Bounty Approach

The business model transformation of companies is happening quite rapidly. Without the necessary planning and preparation process, the risks that may occur in issues such as patching and antivirus signature updates of the devices connected to the company network can be dreadful. Covid-19 made sensitive business secrets be physically accessible from outside the office. If companies don’t want to experience data breaches and face high financial and reputational losses they better act quickly against unauthorized accesses.

Before being exposed to this increased number of attacks with the pandemic, it’s a smart choice to go out of the classical and low-efficiency methods like pentests and to include a more effective approach with an early warning mechanism like bug bounty. Platforms like BugBounter.com, rapidly and effectively addresses the need for companies to find vulnerabilities thanks to the independent research community registered on its bug bounty platform.

So, by taking advantage of that, companies can discover critical vulnerabilities in their systems with a much faster and result-oriented approach which is much needed during these times. It can assist the companies with white hat hackers and improve their defenses accordingly, at a much more affordable cost compared to simple pentests. Bug bounty researchers are:

• A much larger audience than the limited number of cyber security teams of companies

• A team of experts that has a lesser possibility to make mistakes

• Applying an end-to-end cybersecurity coverage process thanks to the crowdsourced approach

• Aware and experienced about many different sides of the cyber world

Conclusion

In today’s dire times, cybersecurity is gaining more and more importance as the time flies by. Numbers of cyber threats have multiplied and the attacks are dangerously frequent. Therefore, companies should take proactive steps to prevent their data from getting breached. There are 4 main topics that companies should direct greater attention to.

Luckily, Bug Bounty approach to cyber security is highly efficient for assessing those issues with extensive vulnerability disclosure. The crowdsourced ecosystem and highly talented ethical hackers to deal with cybersecurity threats come to rescue.

Eventually, the process of security threat detection and prevention is much quicker and less costly under these circumstances. Those traits are quite crucial for the remote working atmosphere that the whole world breathes in.