FINAL WORD

Fady Younes , Cybersecurity Director , Middle East and Africa , Cisco , on why organisations need to be proactive in developing comprehensive security strategies and take the evolving threat landscape serious .

of COVID-19 – both on general sense of wellbeing and the critical infrastructures which connect and protect to ensure our livelihoods . From an enterprise standpoint , cyber attackers have increasingly seized the world of remote working and e-learning to exploit vulnerabilities in systems and steal critical information via ransomware tactics .

The nature of these threats has been changing in recent times and research conducted by Cisco Talos discovered multiple threats using the pandemic to lure victims with Coronavirus themes , as the public searched for information about the condition . Where businesses once viewed these attacks as a nuisance , they are now creating widespread disruption , loss of sensitive information and damage company reputation . This is being caused largely by the adoption of new tactics , techniques , and procedures to deploy ransomware onto corporate networks .

Big game hunting

Rather than activating ransomware on the first successfully compromised system , attackers now leverage the infected system as an initial access point into the network . Once this is established , they can then move across the network to gain additional systems and privileged access to critical network infrastructure . This enables the ransomware to be activated on all these systems simultaneously to

74 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www . intelligentcio . com