IT-ZOOM: "Medium-sized companies are lulled into a false sense of security"

ITM: Mr. Seidl, what influence did the 2020 corona pandemic have on cybercrime in Germany?

Klaus Seidl: Due to the Covid-19 pandemic , many Germans work from home. Home office solutions, which are often quickly implemented due to time pressure, result in security gaps that are used specifically by cyber criminals. We have a worldwide study related to IT security trainingand home office. It has been shown that 30 percent of the German respondents have not received any guidelines on the private use of company devices. This is really problematic, because 55 percent of respondents say that they are only sometimes or never aware that links in emails, on social media platforms or websites can pose a security threat to their company devices.

Cyber ​​criminals are also aware of these security gaps and try to exploit them with targeted attacks. We found that from January to the end of October 2020, a total of 1.02 billion attacks were carried out on Mimecast-protected systems worldwide. By comparison, the total number of such attacks in 2019 was 932 million.