Amid the many heartwarming stories to emerge during the COVID-19 pandemic about people, communities and businesses mobilizing to support one another and the public good, the global health crisis also has revealed a darker reality about the digitally-focused world we live in: that as soon as vulnerabilities are exposed, attempts to exploit them are sure to follow.
This certainly applies to the communications networks on which businesses, schools, governments, medical providers and citizens have been dependent during the pandemic. As the crisis escalated, so did the reliance of many of these entities on their digital communications networks, and so, too, did the cyber security threats posed to these organizations, their data and their users.
The COVID-19 CTI League, a volunteer group of CTI experts formed specifically to neutralize cyber threats aimed at exploiting vulnerabilities related to the current pandemic, cited “reports of suspicious domains, compromised infrastructures, and other cyber-attacks by malicious actors.”
As a communications services provider that manages network security on behalf of healthcare providers, businesses, government agencies, schools and other organizations, Windstream recommends several steps and safeguards to protect wide area networks (WANs):
Ultimately, these kinds of tools and practices create a pathway to unified threat management — a model for a single, unified security instance to protect an enterprise, its network and its data during a crisis and whenever business returns to normalcy.
