Highlights
The annual cost of cybercrime in 2020 will be more than 1% of the global gross domestic product (GDP).
About 80% of firms have witnessed an increase in cyberattacks in the year 2020.
Undoubtedly, COVID-19 was the dominant theme of 2020. As news of the pandemic made the headlines throughout the tumultuous year, novel norms such as social distancing made work-from-home an absolute necessity.
With individuals already coping with an array of unprecedented changes, cybercriminals took advantage of the surmounting panic. They launched sophisticated scams and phishing attacks on enterprise infrastructure, individual computing systems and healthcare and research institutions. In March 2020, as India went into a nation-wide lockdown, there was a 667% rise in the use of COVID-19-related phishing attacks by threat actors since the end of February.