Christmas for Ransomware: How COVID-19 Is Fueling Cybercrime

November 18, 2020 Alex Woodie

American tech professionals may be feeling secure working from home in 2020, but that warm fuzzy feeling quickly turns into a sticky, cold sweat when one realizes all the overtime that cybercriminals are putting in to steal your hard-won resources. The situation is getting so bad that some have taken to calling COVID-19 “Christmas for ransomware.”

According to Bitdefender’s “Mid-Year Threat Landscape Report 2020,” reports of ransomware increased by 715 percent from the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2020. The company says that this figure suggests that threat actors upped their ransomware campaigns to …