How Coronavirus Might Affect Your Online Security

The outbreak of Covid-19, also referred to as the novel coronavirus, has brought the world to a standstill. While it is most likely not going to end the world so you don’t really need to look into any apocalyptic scenarios at this point in time, the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of ways in which the virus might just end up impacting you if you are not careful and as a result of the fact that you are being advised by a lot of doctors as well as other kinds of healthcare professionals to stay at home and self isolate as this is perhaps the best thing that can result in you preventing the virus from spreading any more than it already has.

Since a lot of people are not going to be leaving their homes, this has resulted in many corporations encouraging their employees to work from home. This is being done in order to ensure that no matter what happens, work will continue to be done so that when we are past this outbreak the world can keep going on as normal and work can pick up in a way that would make it more likely that things would continue operating in a manner that is as smooth as possible all in all.

However, this has given rise to a lot of new potential avenues that hackers might want to take advantage of. When you are working in a corporate office there are countless checks and balances that would make it quite difficult for someone to hack into the system. However, if you are working from home this could potentially give hackers an easier system to crack, and as a result of the fact that we might see a rise in hacking across the world especially when it comes to people that are working for corporations and are attempting to make it so that they might just be able to figure out a way to get work done without having to go out.

Corporate workers are not the only people that are at risk here. The fact of the matter is that a lot of hackers know that there are countless people out there that are very concerned indeed, and because of the fact that they are concerned they would want to download apps and the like that would help them set their minds at ease at least in some way, shape or form.

Hackers will know that people will be less discerning about the apps that they download due to the reason that they would be eager to get information. Hence, we are likely to see a huge uptick in the number of apps that might try to steal your data.

According to Lookout security researchers, commercial spyware by the name of spymax can be used by pretty much anyone and it has been found in dozens of coronavirus related apps so far. These apps would try to access your camera to spy on you so you should be very careful about the apps that you end up downloading right now as you don’t want something like this to add to the countless worries you probably already have.


Photo: REUTERS/Tyrone Siu

Read next: Internet Crimes on the Rise: Virtual currency saw the largest percentage increase; others include extortion, lottery, social media, and personal data breaches
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