Cybersecurity For Dummies. Joseph Steinberg
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in place, or had such infrastructure but only for a limited portion of their employee populations, were suddenly faced with having to enable people to work from home — often without the ability to prepare users, policies, procedures, and technologies in advance. Many such businesses could not distribute laptops or security devices fast enough to prevent work stoppages, and as a result, relied on users to utilize their personal devices for work purposes without any additional security layers added.
Likewise, few organizations offered their employees separate Internet connections or separate routers for their remote workstations, so remote workers were nearly always sharing physical and logical networks with their other personal devices and possibly with their children who may have been gaming and/or attending virtual school. The security risks of doing such is discussed in detail in Chapter 6.
Compounding COVID-19–inflicted cybersecurity problems was the fact that while many employers did provide some forms of endpoint security software, many did not, and even those that did rarely addressed any hardware-based risks. To this day, for example, many employers have no idea what router models their employees are using for remote access or when such devices were last updated.
Another major cybersecurity concern created by the pandemic has been that communications between employees shifted from conference rooms to remote meetings, opening the doors for hackers to disrupt communications or steal confidential information. The problems were so bad that a new term “zoom bombing” was coined in 2020 to refer to the practice of mischievous folks joining and wreaking havoc in virtual meetings to which they were never invited.
Of course, the fact that people who would otherwise work together in the same location are suddenly unable to communicate quickly in person has also opened the door for many social engineering attacks. For example, a CFO who receives an email from the boss asking that the company pay a certain party for services cannot verify the validity of the request as the CFO has done many times in the past by walking ten feet to the boss’s office to confirm that the boss actually sent the message.
Likewise, people working in homes in which children are in virtual school, or quarantined, or simply living, often suffer from far more interruptions than they would had they been working in an office setting. Interruptions often lead to mistakes, and mistakes often lead to cybersecurity problems. The stress of remaining socially isolated for long periods of time also increases the odds of people making dangerous cybersecurity errors.
At a macro level, the sudden shift to work-at-home arrangements has meant that many cybersecurity professionals are increasingly overwhelmed, a problem further exacerbated by organizations having to reallocate resources — sometimes shifting both people and money from security projects to efforts to ensure continuity of operations.
And, of course, being confined to their homes has afforded many hackers more time to work on their crafts as well, perhaps contributing to the significant rise in the number of zero-day attacks and other newer forms of cybersecurity attacks seen since the pandemic’s onset. Chapter 2 dives into many of the common cyberattacks that are out there.
Social shifts
Various changes in the ways that humans behave and interact with one another have also had a major impact on cybersecurity. The Internet, for example, allows people from all over the world to interact in real-time. Of course, this real-time interaction also enables criminals all over the world to commit crimes remotely. But it also allows citizens of repressive countries and free countries to communicate, creating opportunities for dispelling the perpetual propaganda utilized as excuses for the failure of totalitarianism to produce quality of lives on par with the democratic world. At the same time, it also delivers to the cyberwarriors of governments at odds with one another the ability to launch attacks via the same network.
The conversion of various information management systems from paper to computer, from isolated to Internet-connected, and from accessible-only-in-the-office to accessible from any smartphone or computer has dramatically changed the equation when it comes to what information hackers can steal. And the COVID-19 pandemic has brought many of these issues to the forefront.
Furthermore, in many cases in which technological conversions were, for security reasons, not initially done, the pressure emanating from the expectations of modern people that every piece of data be available to them at all times from anywhere has forced such conversions to occur, creating additional opportunities for criminals. To the delight of hackers, many organizations that, in the past, wisely protected sensitive information by keeping it offline have simply lost the ability to enjoy such protections if they want to stay in business. No modern example portrays this as well as the sudden global shift to remote working arrangements in 2020.
Social media has also transformed the world of information — with people growing accustomed to sharing far more about themselves than ever before — often with audiences far larger than before as well. Today, due to the behavioral shift in this regard, it is trivial for evildoers from anywhere to assemble lists of a target’s friends, professional colleagues, and relatives and to establish mechanisms for communication with all those people. Likewise, it is easier than ever before to find out what technologies a particular firm utilizes and for what purposes, discover people’s travel schedules, and ascertain their opinions on various topics or their tastes in music and movies. The trend toward increased sharing continues. Most people remain blindly unaware of, and unconcerned with, how much information about them lives on Internet-connected machines and how much other information about them can be extrapolated from the aforementioned data.
All these changes have translated into a scary reality: Due to societal shifts, evildoers can easily launch much larger, more sophisticated social engineering attacks today than they could just a few years.
Economic model shifts
Connecting nearly the entire world has allowed the Internet to facilitate other trends with tremendous cybersecurity ramifications. Operational models that were once unthinkable, such as that of an American company utilizing a call center in India and a software development shop in the Philippines, have become the mainstay of many corporations. These changes, however, create cybersecurity risks of many kinds.
The last 20 years have seen a tremendous growth in the outsourcing of various tasks from locations in which they’re more expensive to carry out to regions in which they can be accomplished at much lower costs. The notion that a company in the United States could rely primarily on computer programmers in India or in the Philippines or that entrepreneurs in New York seeking to have a logo made for their business could, shortly before going to bed, pay someone halfway around the globe $5.50 to create it and have the logo in their email inbox immediately upon waking up the next morning, would have sounded like economic science-fiction a generation ago. Today, it’s not only common, but also in many cases, it is more common than any other method of achieving similar results.
Of course, many cybersecurity ramifications result from such transformations of how people do business.
Data being transmitted needs to be protected from destruction, modification, and theft, and globalization means that greater assurance is needed to ensure that back doors are not intentionally or inadvertently inserted into code. Greater protections are needed to prevent the theft of intellectual property and other forms of corporate espionage. Code developed in foreign countries, for example, may be at risk of having backdoors inserted by agents of their respective governments. Likewise, computer equipment may have backdoors