Lesson from Lockdowns: Crucial to Scale-Up Cybersecurity Services
The COVID-19 pandemic and governmental movement restrictions have led to an increased dependency on online services for individuals and businesses alike.
Cybercriminals quickly identified this trend as an opportunity for gaining profits. They responded by intensifying cyberattack volume and introducing sophisticated coronavirus-themed attack schemes to steal sensitive user information and business data.
At Allot, we work closely with Communication Service Providers (CSPs) worldwide to protect individuals and companies against cyber-attacks. In data collected from European CSP customers, we see a concerning increase in cybercriminal activity.
These attacks include Malware, Ransomware, Phishing, Cryptojacking and more, which were all blocked by Allot’s cybersecurity solutions.
As many European countries eased out of the initial COVID-19 lockdown and returned to normal, total blocks decreased by 1%, down from 241 million blocking events in July to 238 million in August. But, as soon as the second wave hit Europe, the numbers quickly rose to new peaks, reaching 267 million in September.
Phishing remains the predominant type of website attack in Europe, and the COVID-19 pandemic added additional fuel as cybercriminals took advantage of the crisis to launch further attacks that preyed on people’s fears. Phishing represented 54% of cyberattacks blocked by Allot-based solutions operating in Europe during Q3, which is highlighted in the Q3 European Cyber Threat Report that’s now available for download.
Phishing is a widespread cybercriminal activity in which an attacker (or attacker group) aims to entice a victim to provide personal data for further use in fraudulent activities. With COVID-19, we have observed a new strain of phishing campaigns. Cyber actors use COVID-19 themed phishing emails, often impersonating government and health authorities to deceive already worried users into sharing confidential and sensitive information such as account credentials and credit card information. Working from home and device sharing between family members has extenuated the need for protecting sensitive data stored locally and online.
Allot Secure is a network-based cybersecurity platform offered as a service to CSPs for CSPs to provide cybersecurity protection and content control to users and SMBs. The platform features a set of cybersecurity services and tools that enable a mass-market CSP offering operated and supported by Allot.
To be ready to address the ever-growing demand for cyber protection and content filtering services, we recently migrated Allot Secure service backend functions for hosting to the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Allot Secure backend is designed to provide reliable, low-latency, real-time threat protection services to our customers. We can now more easily scale-up our cybersecurity services to reach even more users, well beyond the tens of millions of end-users already served worldwide by Allot Secure.
We plan to continue leveraging the power of AWS to accelerate our innovation to improve user protection, user experience, and engagement with CSPs.
Contact us if you’d like to learn more.
