The Impact of COVID-19 on Cybersecurity

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic-imposed restrictions on individuals' daily lives and attempted to prevent coronavirus spread and forced many governments to impose social distancing in all sectors, which caused everyone to work remotely. Many challenges have emerged due to the changes that occurred in our lives in 2020. shift to working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which gets a chance of increasing piracy and cyber-attacks by exploiting many vulnerabilities resulting from employees' remote work into their institutions' electronic systems. Many companies were unprepared to counter these changes, which led to many consequences to be attacked.  And attackers took advantage of those companies that did not have sufficient protection for work remotely. They exploited the pandemic to publish fake news and impersonated websites to achieve their malicious intent.  The research discussed the reasons for a surge in cybercrime during the COVID-19 pandemic and clarified the most affected sector by cyber-attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, it highlighted the most common cyber-attacks that were carried out during the current period (COVID-19). Also discussed some cyberattacks that target some companies on the pandemic. The research conducted was based on literature reviews and theoretical that defined the reasons for the increased attack through the COVID-19 pandemic. This research reviewed the analytical data that identified the most sector and attack that happened during COVID-19.