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Banking & finance
BusinessBanking & Finance

Cybercriminals are targeting Asia-Pacific banks and businesses as coronavirus disrupts daily life

  • More than half of Asia-Pacific businesses suffered at least one cybersecurity scare during work from home, according to survey
  • Banking industry ‘target of choice’ for cybercriminals, according to Reserve Bank of India

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Chad Bray

Cybercriminals are using the unprecedented disruption in daily life brought on by the coronavirus pandemic to try to breach systems and dupe employees and customers of banks, payment providers, online retailers and other businesses at an alarming pace, according to cybersecurity experts and regulators.

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Social-distancing restrictions adopted as the pandemic worsened globally forced many companies to shift the bulk of their workforce out of the office and spurred growth in online shopping and banking, including a cadre of clients in Asia who never banked digitally before.

It also opened the door for scammers to use phishing emails and automated attacks to try to gain access to accounts or critical systems, according to Mark Lukie, sales-engineer manager for Asia-Pacific and Japan at cybersecurity provider Barracuda Networks. For example, phishing attacks where an email is made to appear to have come from a trusted source or company spiked by almost 670 per cent globally as the pandemic worsened in February and March of this year, he said.

“The bad guys never really take a holiday. It doesn’t matter if it is a pandemic,” Lukie said. “They basically pivot and shift [their attacks] to make themselves more relevant.”

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Worldwide Covid-19 death toll surpasses 1 million

Worldwide Covid-19 death toll surpasses 1 million

More than half of businesses surveyed in Asia said they experienced at least one major security scare since shifting to work from home this year, according to a September 22 report by Barracuda.

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