Cybersecurity and Countermeasures at the Time of Pandemic

Rabie A. Ramadan,Ayman El-Sayed,Abdullah J. Alzahrani,Bassam W. Aboshosha,Jalawi Sulaiman Alshudukhi,Mohamed M. Dessouky,Muhammad Arif

doi:10.1155/2021/6627264

Abstract

With the emergence of one of this century’s deadliest pandemics, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has an enormous effect globally with a quick spread worldwide. This made the World Health Organization announce it as a pandemic. COVID-19 has pushed countries to follow new behaviors such as social distancing, hand washing, and remote work and to shut down organizations, businesses, and airports. At the same time, white hats are doing their best to accommodate the pandemic. However, while white hats are protecting people, black hats are taking advantage of the situation, which creates a cybersecurity pandemic on the other hand. This paper discusses the cybersecurity issues at this period due to finding information or finding another related research that had not been discussed before. This paper presents the cybersecurity attacks during the COVID-19 epidemic time. A lot of information has been collected from the World Health Organization (WHO), trusted organizations, news sources, official governmental reports, and available research articles. This paper then classifies the cybersecurity attacks and threats at the period of COVID-19 and provides recommendations and countermeasures for each type. This paper surveys the cybersecurity attacks and their countermeasures and reports the ongoing cybersecurity attacks and threats at this period of time. Moreover, it is also a step towards analyzing the efficiency of the country’s infrastructure as well as hackers and criminals’ social behavior at the time of the pandemic.

Highlights

Humanity has been suffering from several diseases and epidemics since the early days
The volume and prevalence of these diseases have not increased dramatically over the past decades, as happening recently. is noticeable shift in recent times is the result of multiple factors where geography and widespread trade could be one of the reasons in pandemic spread
Other epidemics have spread in the last decade, perhaps the most dangerous was the Ebola virus spread to several African countries and the Zika virus which had been spread in South America

Summary

Introduction

Humanity has been suffering from several diseases and epidemics since the early days. Such epidemics cause panic and anxiety in the world due to death acceleration among those who are infected and the number of people infected every day [5, 6]. Such pandemics cause the stock markets to collapse as well as other world’s finance, business, and investment, which may bring down the economies of those infected countries. At the time the world is busy with treating the people and their health, this paper reports people’s behavior in terms of security, either computer security and physical security. Machine damage EM pulse different shapes, but the most important method is flooding [13, 14]

Cybersecurity Pandemic

Findings

16 Defense strategy Network-based