In light of the societal changes wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, this report aims to examine the impact this crisis had on the general cybersecurity landscape, notably in terms of the attack surface and exploitation opportunities; to investigate the changing and recurring patterns of adversarial behaviors; and to illustrate and provide an overview of how threats actors have leveraged said epidemic in Q1/Q2 2020.
Accordingly, this report highlights that the coronavirus pandemic has generated a set of remarkable and psycho-societal, technical, and logistical economic circumstances upon which malicious actors have capitalized. These factors include:
1) an expanded socio-technical attack surface due to the greater use and dependency on services and applications for telework provided through digital infrastructure in general and cloud infrastructure in particular;
2) a psycho-informational environment characterized by anxiety, uncertainty, and high demand for information;
3) a nexus of economic and trade uncertainty/ disruption, emergency procurement processes, compounded by the wide availability of nefarious cyber tools.
23122020_CyberThreatLandscapeCoronaCrisisSource : CSS ETHZ