Modern challenges and cyber threats

 Information security is one of the key tasks of any organization. It was important before, and during the pandemic it acquired particular importance, since the number of cybercriminals increased - those who were already engaged in online fraud were joined by newly minted virtual criminals who had previously carried out their criminal activities in reality. According to the head of the representative office of Check Point Software Technologies in Russia and the CIS countries, Vasily Diaghilev , the cyber world attracted many by the fact that it is possible to earn in it no less than in the real one, but with a lower level of risks. The opportunities that have opened up have allowed criminal groups to obtain additional funding and significantly expand the variability of attacks using phishing and social engineering.

This was facilitated by the forced transition of most organizations to remote work. And if in large companies with independent information security services, reliable communication channels and sufficient material resources, such a transition did not cause any particular difficulties, then for small and medium-sized businesses with from 30 to 200 computers, it became problematic. It was the latter that all the experts who took part in the round table recognized as the main target for malefactors.

The Computer Network Support Specialists are the trained experts and are extremely helpful in the computer networking of an organization.

According to representatives of the IT sphere, the vulnerability of SMEs was mainly due to:

the need for prompt decision-making. "We are accustomed to the fact that we have been implementing information security projects for months, quarters and years, but in the current conditions it was actually necessary to make decisions within a few days or weeks, provide employees with equipment and revise approaches to work organization," Vasily Diaghilev noted;

blurring the boundaries between corporate and personal devices, corporate and personal data - this is due to the fact that many employees work from home on their personal laptops and computers, which a priori have a lower level of protection than corporate resources;

the dependence of information security on people and the insufficient level of knowledge of employees about threats to information security, about methods of their recognition based on their primary characteristics and ways of countering them;

insufficient funding for information security or even a reduction in the cost of this;

problems with import substitution, in particular, a shift in the timing of the replacement of imported hardware, etc.

Meanwhile, experts believe that during the period of the spread of the new coronavirus infection, the role of information security has significantly increased in general. "The fact that information security has become more serious in the life of business in connection with remote work is a fact," said Lev Matveev , Chairman of the Board of Directors of SearchInform, member of the Board of the Association of Software Manufacturers "Russoft"... Statistics speaks in favor of this thesis - for example, in the first half of 2020, the number of court cases related to information leakage in financial institutions has increased than in the entire last year. At the same time, practically all organizations during their remote work faced attempts to "drain" information - both intentional (collusion of employees with malefactors) and unintentional.

As for the types of threats, the experts emphasized that the scammers did not come up with anything new. For example, Alexey Novikov , director of the Positive Technologies security expert center , focused on the fact that all those attack methods that are encountered now (phishing, malware, spam, social engineering, etc.) have existed before, simply due to By the peculiarities of the transition to remote work, with new services for working from personal laptops and workstations within the corporate perimeter, there was a distribution of emphasis in terms of how to attack more effectively. 

Konstantin Ignatiev, head of the content analysis department at Kaspersky Lab, agreed with this., noting that cybercriminals are acting within the framework of the practice that has been developed over the years, but taking into account the specifics of public interest in the topic of coronavirus. For example, there were cases when employees received mailing allegedly from the HR department of their company with information about their dismissal in connection with the decision made by the head of staff optimization in difficult pandemic conditions, and they were asked to find out more detailed information in the infected file attached to the letter or when clicking on a link to a site stealing personal data. The employees themselves, whose personal data fell to third parties, and the companies that received local and network infections in this way suffered damage from such mailings.