Recently, research conducted by Kaspersky, places Portugal in second place in the world ranking of phishingattacks for the second quarter of 2020. In first place in this ranking is Venezuela and behind Portugal, Tunisia.
In Portugal, according to the bulletin of the Observatory of the National Cybersecurity Centre of July 2020, about 160 phishingattacks were registered, the main ones being malwareattacks and unauthorised access. The sector most affected by these attacks was banking.
This type of attack, when well executed, can have very serious consequences for organizations, and the entire structurecan be affected, as well as the respective customers and suppliers.
Kaspersky’s study also shows that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought conditions conducive to the development of new attack strategies, with this public health crisis being a ‘pretext’ for hackers to request confidential and sensitive information from victims.
There were, for example, various attacks on mail and parcel delivery companies, once due to the pandemic, these types of organizations had to resort to more frequent use of digital channels to communicate with customers. Thus, they took advantage of this situation to send misleading emails to customers by impersonating the same institutions.
As already mentioned, banking institutions have also suffered an increase in this type of attack. False messages are sent to customers offering a set of benefits and perks, in order to compensate for the crisis triggered by the pandemic, allowing access to the victims’ bank details and their theft.
It can thus be stated that the pandemic affected multiple sectors of our society, leaving them weakened and more vulnerable to attacks by cybercriminals.
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