Cybercriminals have had a field day during Covid: McAfee India MD

Cybersecurity firm McAfee’s ‘Covid-19 Threat Report: July 2020’, examining cybercriminal activity and the evolution of cyber threats in Q1 2020, says there was an average of 375 new threats per minute and a surge of cybercriminals exploiting the pandemic through Covid-19 themed malicious apps, phishing campaigns, malware, and more. “The end game is to infiltrate networks and cloud services beyond the home,” Sanjay Manohar, managing director, McAfee India, tells Sudhir Chowdhary in an interview. Excerpts:

What have been the dominant themes for cyberattacks in 2020?

The dominant theme of 2020 has been the scale and impact cyber-related attacks have had on our wider society. What started as a trickle of phishing campaigns and the occasional malicious app, quickly turned to a deluge of thousands of malicious URLs and more-than-capable threat actors leveraging our thirst for more information as an entry mechanism into systems across the world.