Ransomware and DDoS Attacks on the Rise During Pandemic
On this blog, we have shared stories about people coming together to fight the coronavirus outbreak, including how manufacturers can retrofit their facilities to produce desperately needed medical equipment and gear or ways to make your remote work setup a best-case scenario. But cybercriminals never rest, and ransomware cases are still out there.
And these criminals are hitting the most vulnerable institutions right now: hospitals.
A Europol report noted there has been an increase in ransomware and DDoS attacks as of late, especially on hospitals. For example, a Czech hospital serving as a COVID-19 testing center was attacked during an outbreak, forcing some services to be temporarily shut down.
DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks can be particularly crippling in today’s climate. This type of attack overloads online services with excess traffic, which creates a disruption to run blackmail campaigns against organizations. Criminals can threaten to take out online services by overrunning them with traffic from botnets unless a payment is made. This is concerning since DDoS is a relatively easy attack, even for low-level cybercriminals. The scripts are also cheap and readily available.
Even if you’re not in the healthcare industry, you could be susceptible to a cyberattack at any moment. 2W Tech has IT Consultants on staff that specialize in security solutions and can help you organization identify where your vulnerabilities are in an effort to keep you safe from ransomware attacks and other outside threats. Contact us today to learn about our security solutions.