If anyone has a bird’s-eye view of the shifting trends in cybersecurity, it is Eugene Kaspersky. The antivirus company he founded 23 years ago and that bears his name, Kaspersky, is one of the world’s leading anti-malware application vendors, with 400-million users and 270,000 enterprise clients.
Although now headquartered in Zurich, the company’s Russian origins mean he also has intimate knowledge of one of the world’s most notorious cybercriminal environments.
As a result, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced the world into lockdown, he was not surprised to see a significant rise in cybercrime.“When this pandemic was on the rise in China, we saw just a little bit of spam and phishing,” Kaspersky told Business Times in an exclusive interview from his home this week.
“Then the pandemic got to the other countries, and we saw an increase of criminal activity. They used this opportunity to find the victims, to attack the victims, and to cheat the victims.”
It seems that they spent more time at home. Well, they are criminals, but they are also software engineers, so they develop more code at home. And they surprised many, but it was not a surprise to us because it was predictable. So, in April, we saw about a 10% increase of new malicious code they developed.”
The company had already seen the number of new malicious applications intercepted rise to an unprecedented 300,000 pieces of code every single day. In April, this spiked to 330,000.
“This was new for us; we never saw this intensity before. Of course, it's not possible to analyse 100% of the data. So we work 24/7. For us, there's no weekends, no holidays.”
But that doesn’t apply to the criminals. The first two weeks of May saw a slowdown in activity, revealing another truth that was obvious to Kaspersky but perhaps not to many Western observers: in Russia, the May Day holiday is taken seriously by criminals as much as by the public. But it still came as a surprise.
“Cybercrime is seasonal because the criminals are human too. So they take May 1 and other days in May as holidays, and they relax during that time. This year we were expecting that there would be no change in their activity because they are at home. Instead, we saw a 15%-20% decrease in the different areas of malicious activity in the first half of May.”
The company makes live attack statistics available at the website securelist.com, and it makes fascinating reading. During May, China and Iran have been among the countries most heavily subjected to network attacks, SA ranks eighth in malicious e-mail recipients, and six African countries rank in the global top 10 of local infections of devices. The US ranks number one in terms of vulnerabilities.
The spoils of cybercrime can be huge. A campaign called Carbanak, uncovered by Kaspersky in 2014, fleeced close to $1bn from banks and individuals before its mastermind was arrested in Spain in 2018. Now, gangs are licking their lips at the prospects of a captive audience.
“There are two major issues with people at home,” says Kaspersky. “First of all, they spend much more time on the internet. So they click more links, there are more ways they are in touch with cyber criminals, and so there are more ways to be attacked or cheated by bad guys.”
The second issue is that the big enterprises have IT security teams that can provide the necessary level of security at home for every employee. All our employees are now at home, but they are protected with all the necessary security layers, so they are protected by the enterprise perimeter.
“But of course, not many businesses have this ability, they don't have the resources, they don't have people for that. And unfortunately, especially small and medium businesses, their employees at home in terms of security are almost naked.”
The statistics underline the danger: increasing attempts to hack enterprises by hacking into home computers. Working from home has never been more dangerous.
• Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za.
