Undoubtedly everyone has had their own individual grievances caused by the global epidemic causing virus COVID-19, but one trend proves to be true amongst a large portion of remote workers. This trend is of course the increase in cyber attacks in all forms ranging from complex social engineering plots to more traditional brute force attack vectors. The influx of individuals working from home triggered a boom in remote working environments and greater reliance on cloud-based technologies which are more susceptible to breaches by the nature of its design.
The bar that cyber criminals have been meeting routinely every year has been raised exponentially along side the opportunity for easily obtainable wealth by virtue of cyber ignorance. The overall increase in well known phishing scams as well as bizarre schemes involving crisis actors. "Crisis actor" was seldom a term used when discussing social engineering attacks but the recent popularity is undeniably impressive, it generally entails the use of a trained actor, role player, volunteer, or other person engaged to portray a disaster victim during emergency drills to train first responders.
The use of a crisis actor in a cyber attack could range drastically based on the situation, but a good encompassing example would be the attack preformed at the hacker convention DEFCON where a female crisis actor was deployed to gain access to a targets bank account with just a phone and a fake video of a crying baby playing in the background. The fact of the matter is that most of the scams used before the virus hit are still working and evolving, cyber crime is more apparent than ever in our current remote lives so proper precaution needs to be taken by companies of all sizes as well as active awareness provided by the everyday working individual.