Tag: pandemic

Cyberattacks up during the pandemic

Posted on by Comunicació

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about a digital transformation in all spheres: schools found themselves having to conduct classes and all interaction with pupils via internet, while a large number of companies introduced teleworking between their teams and continue to work remotely or combine this with on-site activity at their offices.

But it doesn’t stop there. A study confirms that the creation of new domains in Europe is up by 20% because of the pandemic, an increase most likely stemming from the fact that most businesses have had to undergo a transformation and get online to be able to keep offering customers their products and services.

Yet the digital transformation has its downside too, with cyberattacks mushrooming in 2020 and half of them attributable to the increase in teleworking caused by the pandemic: “Over half of organisations weren’t ready for the digitalisation needed to implement teleworking”, affirms a study by ACCIÓ and the Cybersecurity Agency of Catalonia.

The same study states that “on a global scale estimates put the rate of cyberattacks in 2021 at one every eleven seconds. This figure has risen considerably in recent years: in 2016 the average was 40 seconds”.

One of the most common forms of IT attack is ransomware, with malicious software or a virus encrypting the whole content of a computer and demanding a ransom to decrypt it. Another is phishing, involving the fraudulent supplanting of identity and aimed at businesses and individuals alike: recipients get an email or mobile phone message requesting data or passwords. One of the most common scenarios is where a bank is imitated, with the recipient getting a message asking them to confirm a user ID and password which are then used to access the account.

How to spot internet fraud?

A quick check of the domain the message is trying to direct us to is one way to detect this. With both ransomware and phishing, it’s likely they’re trying to supplant the identity of recognised organisations to either get us to download a virus or to get access to our user data. But one important datum they can’t supplant is the domain of the real organisation.

Carrying on with the bank as an example, imagine you’re contacted by your bank, “Bank Segur”, and you know their website is bancsegur.barcelona. If you get a message from the bank asking you to access a page with the domain bancsegur.xxxxx.barcelona, here’s your clue that this is a fraud. Why? Because in this case the domain is xxxxx.barcelona, and bancsegur.xxxxx.barcelona is a subdomain. In other words, we should always look at what comes just before .barcelona (or .cat, .com, .es etc.).

If you’re still unsure, the best thing to do is not to reply to the message and to contact the organisation another way, via their customer service phone line, social media or the email address on the website you usually use.

New domains up by 20% in Europe due to the pandemic

Posted on by Ana Tapia

The pandemic, and in particular the lockdown in the spring, has prompted an increase in the creation of new domains.

The recommendation for people to work from home and the impossibility of attending to customers in traditional establishments mean that so far this year the number of newly created websites is up by 20% in Europe, with e-commerce accounting for a large volume.

The data for the whole of Europe is handled by the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR), whose goal is to promote and participate in the development of high standards for Internet Country Code Top-Level Domain Registries (ccTLDs), in other words, the two-letter domains corresponding to countries.

For instance, .es domains (Spain) reached the same levels as in 2013, while .it domains (Italy) reached record figures, with over 60,000 new domains registered.

With the exception of August (summer in the northern hemisphere and consequently in Europe), the volume of registrations was high and averaged 0.9% in the last quarter (some 3.4% over the last 12 months).

At the peak of the first lockdown, newly created domains rose by 20% compared to the same period last year. Though some doubt remains as to whether this can be attributed to the pandemic, if it was the case, it would be a matter of checking whether these domains are renewed once the health crisis is over.

The average number of .barcelona domain renewals is up by 10% compared to last year, and 3% compared to 2018. This figure means we can affirm that although domain loyalty is reasonably high, there is still room for it to improve.