Cybersecurity awareness month falls on every October to promote understanding of digital security and equip everyone to protect their personal data against online crimes.
In response, Don Tan, Senior Director of Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) at Lookout, leading provider of endpoint and cloud security solutions has shared a comment on the cybersecurity Awareness Month.
“This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we would like to draw attention to the dangers of cyberattacks that threaten individual consumers, businesses, government agencies and our critical infrastructure and essential services.
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Most cyber attacks or data breaches start with phishing. In Singapore, we have seen a rapid increase in phishing attempts with the rapid adoption of e-commerce applications and online banking throughout the pandemic. According to the Singapore Police Force, a total of $227.8 million was lost to the top ten scam types which included phishing in the first six months of this year. According to our data, the exposure to phishing increased 127 percent between Q4 2020 to Q1 2021. We also observed that the phishing encounter rate in Singapore is almost half at 41.6 percent across iOS and Android devices.
When phishing is used to steal login credentials, it opens up a world of possibilities for cybercriminals. With one set of credentials, bad actors can then try to log in to a number of common cloud-based services. Once they’ve successfully logged in, they can move laterally within an organisation and find highly sensitive and valuable information such as credit card numbers, bank account details, personally identifiable information (PII), to either encrypt for ransom or to sell on the dark web. Same is true for individual consumers, especially since it’s so common for people to use the same passwords across multiple accounts.
Phishing attacks have continued to evolve in techniques and sophistication, but the basic approach of trying to create a sense of urgency or impersonating a figure of trust has remained constant. It’s important to take a step back and evaluate the situation. For organisations, it is critical that they implement proper security controls across mobile devices and hybrid environments to enforce Zero Trust.”
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