The market sell-off induced by the pandemic was a good opportunity for investors to pick up good stocks cheaply. It was also an effective time for cybercriminals to launch attacks.
According to Temasek-linked Ensign InfoSecurity, almost all phishing campaigns detected in Singapore last year were Covid-19-themed.
“Singapore’s Circuit Breaker period in 2020 provided an opportune timeframe for threat actors to launch phishing attacks as they seek to exploit the users’ anxiety, fear, and curiosity through social engineering tactics,” says the cybersecurity company in its Cyber Threat Landscape 2021 report.
In addition to the common but effective tactic, Ensign also found that Covid-19-themed phishing attacks are more effective.
In an exercise Ensign conducted to test a client’s cybersecurity measures, 35% of the organisation’s employees clicked on the simulated malicious link included in Ensign’s mock Covid-19-related phishing email and provided their personal information. This is 10% higher than the average result of past exercises, demonstrating the effectiveness of customised, well-timed phishing campaigns.
According to Ensign, this past year, the most common targets for cyberattacks carried out in Singapore were organisations in manufacturing, banking and finance, which is in line with what Ensign observed across Asia Pacific.
Tech companies were seen to be prime beneficiaries of the pandemic. However, Ensign found out that technology service companies are themselves attractive targets. If these companies are breached, the perpetrators are able to access data and information of the customers of these technology companies.
Furthermore, cyber attackers also target technology hardware and software vendors to breach and implant malicious codes and components into the vendors’ product development systems, enabling them to rapidly develop zero-day exploits or create backdoors to compromise the integrity of the products, allowing them to readily reach a larger pool of targets.
“Technology suppliers and service providers will continue to be lucrative targets for threat actors as organisations become increasingly reliant on digital technologies to support their business operations and position themselves for the future,” says Steven Ng, CIO and EVP of managed security services, Ensign.
“If threat actors can successfully compromise just one of these companies’ systems, it can create a ripple effect that will impact large groups of organisations across industries and geographies,” he says.
Ng adds that organisations need to recognise that as their cyber supply chain ecosystem expands and diversifies, they will also need to take additional steps to mitigate the elevated cyber risks that come with it.
“This includes increasing the organisation’s situational awareness by maintaining a complete inventory of the software, hardware, and information assets that are within their network, and those managed by their partners and vendors,” says Ng.
Ensign has also observed cyber attackers stepping up “reconnaissance efforts” to find network vulnerabilities in Singapore. In 2020, the firm detected a 360% year-on-year increase in port scanning activities in Singapore, signalling heightened interest to exploit vulnerabilities in organisations’ IT systems.
Photo credit: Philipp Katzenberger / Unsplash
