Trend Micro, a leader in cloud security, has released its annual mid-year roundup report, which reveals COVID-19 related threats as the single largest type of threat in the first half of the year. In just six months, Trend Micro blocked 8.8 million COVID-19 related threats, nearly 92% of which were spam delivered via emails.
Cybercriminals shifted their focus from January through June to take advantage of global interest in the pandemic. The risk to businesses was compounded by security gaps created by a completely remote workforce.
During the first half of 2020, Bahrain tallied up a combined 2,423,846 email, URL and malware threats detected. Bahrain experienced 2,062,919 email threats, 299,423 URL victims, 561 URL hosted and 60,943 malware detections.
The Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) saw 56,870,977 combined email, URL and malware threats detected during the first half of 2020. Cyberthreats included 41,236,550 email threats, 13,181,016 URL victims, 2,392,097 malware detections and 61,314 URL hosted threats.
“The high levels of cyberattacks in Bahrain and the GCC show that while the pandemic has dominated all of our lives during the first half of 2020, it’s not slowing down the cybercriminals,” said Assad Arabi, Country Manager – Bahrain, Trend Micro.
In total, Trend Micro blocked 27.8 billion cyberthreats in the first half of 2020, 93% of which were email-borne.
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