Cybersecurity and Countermeasures at the Time of Pandemic

Abstract

With the emergence of one of this century's deadliest pandemics, coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has an enormous effect globally with a quick spread worldwide. This made the World Health Organization announce it as a pandemic. COVID-19 has pushed countries to follow new behaviors such as social distancing, hand washing, and remote work and to shut down organizations, businesses, and airports. At the same time, white hats are doing their best to accommodate the pandemic. However, while white hats are protecting people, black hats are taking advantage of the situation, which creates a cybersecurity pandemic on the other hand. This paper discusses the cybersecurity issues at this period due to finding information or finding another related research that had not been discussed before. This paper presents the cybersecurity attacks during the COVID-19 epidemic time. A lot of information has been collected from the World Health Organization (WHO), trusted organizations, news sources, official governmental reports, and available research articles. This paper then classifies the cybersecurity attacks and threats at the period of COVID-19 and provides recommendations and countermeasures for each type. This paper surveys the cybersecurity attacks and their countermeasures and reports the ongoing cybersecurity attacks and threats at this period of time. Moreover, it is also a step towards analyzing the efficiency of the country's infrastructure as well as hackers and criminals' social behavior at the time of the pandemic.