In the past year, the Fortinet FortiGuard Labs team has found a dramatic increase in the cyber threat landscape. Its Global Threat Landscape Report determined a sevenfold surge in overall ransomware activity in the second half of 2020. Sectors that have been heavily targeted by these attacks include healthcare, and professional services and consumer services firms, with the public sector being a particularly attractive target. But ransomware has adapted, and the recent spike in its use directly results from the disruption that businesses faced at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the midst of having to deal with this sudden change in the way organisations run their businesses, the transition to working from home brought critical challenges to IT and security team. This has been compounded by the fact that IT teams need to ensure that employees are aware of the latest cyber security threats and best practices on how to deal with them.
