Cyber attacks hit record amid pandemic

The Government’s Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert NZ) fielded a record 2610 reports of cyber attacks in the September quarter, which included the second lockdown for Aucklanders.

It continued a trend of escalating online fraud, phishing and ransomware attacks during the pandemic.

Reported financial loss for the three months to September 30 jumped to $6.4 million from $3.8m in the year-ago quarter — but Cert NZ says a lot of offending is likely going unreported, either because victims are too sheepish or because they are simply not aware of the existence of the relatively new cyber agency.

An old favourite returned during the quarter — DDoS, or distributed denial of service attacks — such as the one that hit the NZX during August, rendering its website inaccessible by smothering it with automated connection requests (usually money is demanded to stop; NZX would not comment on that point).

And as revealed by the Herald on Tuesday, Cert NZ has also seen the emergence of a new scam tailored to the pandemic remote-working boom: emails purporting to be Zoom meeting invites, but containing links to malicious software that could take over your computer.

AUT computer science professor Dave Parry told the Herald Covid was a double-whammy.

The pandemic has spurred a working-from-home boom, often involving much lower security, at the same time that lockdowns around the globe had reduced many of organised crimes’ usual “real-life” avenues — leading to a spike in cybercrime.

“We’ve seen a significant rise in reports of unauthorised access to organisations’ networks within the last six months as more and more people work remotely,” Cert NZ response manager Nadia Yousef told the Herald.