Cyber attacks continue to mount during COVID-19 crisis, top U.S. analyst

Top U.S. cyber security analyst on Wednesday raised alarms over the growing threat from cybercriminals in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, TURAN's Washington correspondent reports.

"If you are wondering [whether] cyber attacks are slowing down in this environment with COVID-19, they are not.. In fact, they are increasing," Edward M. Stroz, co-president of Aon Cyber Solutions and former special agent with the FBI, told reporters during virtual briefing organized by the State Department's Foreign Press Center.

Researchers and industry analysts are concerned that, even during this worldwide crisis where the majority are pulling together in the fight against the pandemic, there is an army of hackers carrying out an increasing number of malicious cyber and ransomware attacks on all manner of organizations including healthcare groups.

Cybercrime is unaffected by social distancing, and during times of disruption, individuals may be more prone to falling victim to cybercrime.

"We also see examples of some of the extremist groups trying to take advantage of the current situation in the world to sort of encourage their followers to use this time of disruption to try to go after and attack the organizations that they hate and to encourage their people to use this current situation to be able to be more effective in their adversarial actions," he said.

When asked about the governments with poor human rights records - such as Azerbaijan and Russia - expanding their use of technologies to monitor the movements of their citizens through electronic code system and SMS messages, Stroz told TURAN's correspondent that "this is a very interesting time for that balance between privacy and the public interest."

"This is a very instructive time to say yes, these technologies can be intrusive... We are all vulnerable to the use of technology to be able to monitor citizens," he said, adding that while those technologies are "not evil", they can be used by a government or by an adversary "to be able to find out what you were doing."

"And if an organization, a country, does not have a strong human rights record, you do read stories where there is a concern that those governments or those organizations are then buying and using software that is spyware. It sends back information secretly to the organization that deployed it to show what you’re doing, what they are hearing, what the phone is seeing, and that information can be weaponized by an adversary," he added. "They can be used by powerful governments for ways that are not always honored by their citizenship."

At the same time, he said, "we have seen ways where sometimes people say I’m glad that the government was able to have visibility into things, not because I want to be spied on but because I don’t want to get sick with a virus that could be fatal to me."

Technology can and should play an important role during current effort to save lives. If left unchecked and unchallenged, experts believe, these measures have the potential to fundamentally alter the future of privacy and other human rights.

Alex Raufoglu

Washington  D.C.