Analysing security vulnerability trends throughout the pandemic
Throughout the pandemic, the increasing number of security vulnerabilities affecting major products and services reached alarming levels, according to our analysis of NIST’s (National Institute of Standards and Technology) National Vulnerability Database data.
This trend is indicative of threats to IT assets used by businesses across the globe, with a direct relationship to pandemic-inspired changes in IT and security. The rise of digital and advanced transformations led businesses to purchase new assets to allow remote workers to operate more smoothly. This, in turn, led to oversights on the cybersecurity front in multiple ways. They included:
- A lack of involving security teams in decision-making for new product purchases
- A lack of security validations before a product was rolled out in production environments
- The introduction of changes that led to gaps in the ‘new’ perimeter or change of attack surface of an organisation over the internet.
As a result, at a time when most of the world was shut down and, therefore, a large majority of workers were operating from home, cyber actors aimed to exploit the vulnerabilities in the IT and security products.
Services and solutions impacted by critical and high-risk vulnerabilities identified during this timeline include VPN gateways, email, file transfer, virtualisation and other tech products from the major IT companies. Some of these products derive from some of the most established brands, such as Microsoft, Fortinet, VMWare, Atlassian, etc.
Therefore, it’s not about common vulnerabilities being found every year but rather about the products that play a vital role in supporting corporate networks such as virtualisation, VPN or perimeter gateway devices. Critical or high-risk vulnerabilities in such products would allow threat actors straight access to internal corporate networks, leading to remote control of systems. These weaknesses highlight the critical impact and the higher likelihood of attacks due to threat actors’ opportunity, where success would provide keys to the kingdom.
Analysing data from throughout the pandemic
To gain a better understanding of the effect of Covid-19 on the state of cybersecurity, we are also able to analyse month-by-month data. It accurately displays when cyberattacks were most frequent during Covid-19 and the severity of these threats.
Throughout the pandemic, there were a large number of vulnerabilities, between March 2020 and July 2021 there were a total of 27,887 exposures. Of these vulnerabilities, 2.20% were low risk, 38.95% were medium, 39.96% were deemed high risk and 13.14% of these threats were categorised as critical risks.
