Overview of Key Cyber Security Threats amid COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract: This pandemic has not only affected the world physically but has also caused a major rise in the number of cyberattacks and cybersecurity breaches. In these trying times, the entire paradigm has shifted, forcing every individual to adapt to remote working. Since everything has shifted from its traditional offline methods to online portals, the online traffic has increased tremendously. This paper outlines how and why the number of cyberattacks have increased. Moreover, this paper provides real world cases where cybersecurity attacks have been used in order to extort personal information with numerous statistics and also sheds light upon various preventative methods one can adopt in order to prevent falling victim to any cybercrime. This paper is assembled into two parts. The first part highlights few of the most common cyberattacks which were observed to have upsurged manifold times during the COVID-19 pandemic and used excessively by cybercriminals to unethically derive the personal information of unsuspecting users for malicious reasons. These three main methods being phishing, malware and data breaches. The second part talks about ways and methods to prevent them.