South Africa is firmly in the sights of international cybercrime syndicates, who have been ramping up their attacks on local companies in the past six months – reveals cybersecurity defence, offence and protection specialist, Nclose.
Martin Potgieter, Co-Founder of Nclose, says the Nview MDR team have detected a significant uptick in the number of attempts made against local customers in recent months.
“We, and our colleagues in the cybersecurity sector, are seeing a surge in cybercrime activity – in particular ransomware attacks,” he says. “There has definitely been an increase in syndicates that make use of humans to launch and coordinate their attacks, they are not just relying on automated ransomware attacks.”
Dec 15, 2020
Predicting the future is risky. As is often quipped, predicting the past is hard enough! Certainly, nobody could predict that 2020 would be a year like none other in modern history. The pandemic caused a tremendous realignment of priorities and waves of uncertainty.
It’s ironic, then, that at least one area behaved almost exactly as many predicted it would, and even exceeded expectations. 2020 was a bonanza year for cybercrime, which exploited uncertainty, fear and dramatic changes in company operations. This built off 2019, a year in which security vendor FireEye noted nearly half of identified malware families were brand new. If 2019 was a surge, 2020 provided the bang for cybercrime.