During the COVID 19 pandemic, technology has become an effective solution for dealing with statistics and detecting COVID 19 cases. Many countries came up with their own applications to track and spot out people infected with the coronavirus. To be honest about it, they have worked very well to achieve the purpose of designing them.
However, the excessive reliance on technology has brought multiple security issues. According to ZDNet, a worrying statistic states that users are three times more likely to click on pandemic-related phishing scams. Another statistic presented by the same website shows that 90% of newly created Corona Virus domains are scams. Similar statistics bring up an important question: Why has cybercrime witnessed a noticeable increase during the COVID 19 pandemic?
The Shocking Increase in Cybercrime During the COVID 19 Pandemic
People have shared much of their information during the COVID 19 pandemic, and government platforms have received huge bulk of data from people live in different regions around the globe. Such huge shared data has tempted many cybercriminals to hack, steal identities, and trach people. However, it has been necessary for many users to share their data due to governmental and health procedures.
You can recognize the second reason by searching for COVID 19 related issues over the internet and see how many results you’re going to have. This definitely tells you something about the massive amount of data on the internet that talks about a turning point in the history of humans.
The statistics that we have shared above can tell you why cybercrime increased during the COVID 19 pandemic; you can imagine how many clicks a COVID 19 issue receives when searched on Google or any other search engine. Doubtlessly, it gets a huge number of clicks; this has been a great opportunity for many hackers and snoopers to make use of the pandemic and plan malicious links here and there that are related to COVID 19, which will definitely attract the internet users’ attention, and provoke their curiosity to click on the link. By doing so, a hacking attempt will be successfully performed, and a user’s private life and sensitive information are put at a huge risk.
What Can Be Done About It?
There are some security procedures that you can take to protect your connection to the internet, and consequently, protect your information and privacy. Let’s find out about the most effective ones:
- Use a reliable VPN service: When using one of the best VPN services on the market, you can rest assured that your data and connection to the internet are protected since a good VPN service encrypt the transmitted data over a network.
- Beware of what you click at: As we said earlier, many hack attempts have been using the internet users’ interest in the COVID 19 pandemic issues and planted malicious links and software to them.
In a nutshell, cybercrime has dramatically increased during the COVID 19 pandemic since the excessive use of the internet, and technology, in general, has been inviting for multiple hacking attempts. Still, some security procedures and steps can save you a lot of headaches and contribute to shielding your internet connection against malware, viruses, and hacking attempts.