Articles about COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of biometric technology across industries. From touchless payments at shops and restaurants to reduce the use of cash transactions to biometric-based contact tracing efforts, virtually every industry has had to readapt to meet the shift in customer and regulatory requirements.

The widespread adoption of biometrics was already underway when the coronavirus began to spread in early 2020. Now, companies are moving ahead with the installation of this technology to offer better safety, security, and efficiency to their customers. These three industries, in particular, are well-suite to see their operations advance as a result of biometric adoption.

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Since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis earlier this year 80 percent of companies have seen 'slightly to considerably more' cyberattack attempts, breaking down to 88 percent in the US and 74 percent in the UK.

SIEM specialist Exabeam surveyed more that 1,000 IT security professionals at small- to medium-sized enterprises and finds that a third of respondents experienced a successful cyberattack during COVID-19, leading to network downtime for 40 percent of UK companies and 38 percent of US companies.

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Despite the devastating recent outbreak of the novel coronavirus, phishing attacks continue to drag us and our businesses down. So how exactly do COVID-19 related phishing attacks work?

Cybercriminals have taken it upon themselves to wreak havoc and feed off the fears people have about the virus. Emails are being sent that ask their targets to open attachments containing information about the latest coronavirus statistics or news. Or, they claim to be from legitimate companies offering information about COVID-19.

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The coronavirus crisis has led to many changes in working patterns. But what's its effect on the longer term strategies of businesses?

Cloud communications platform Twilio surveyed over 2,500 enterprise decision makers globally to gauge the effect of the pandemic on their companies' digital transformation and communication roadmaps.

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In the first quarter of 2020 phishing attacks increased by 22.5 percent compared to the end of 2019, and 13 percent of all phishing was related to COVID-19.

A new report from Positive Technologies also shows that in Q1 there were 23 very active APT groups whose attacks targeted mostly government agencies, industrial, finance, and medical institutions.

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AI-powered productivity company enaible has released a new survey looking at executive viewpoints on workforce productivity in light of the economic and remote working impact of COVID-19.

It finds that 83 percent of respondents are relying on productivity to improve both margins and profitability, and 83 percent believe that worker productivity will be critical in their companies' ability to recover from the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Addressing the challenges brought about by COVID-19 should not be the only concern of businesses. It is equally important to look forward to the next normal or the situation after the pandemic. Nobody knows when the virus outbreak will end, but just like many other global health problems in history, it will eventually reach a conclusion.

The end of the pandemic does not automatically mean that all businesses will return to profitability. There will be improvements, but success is never guaranteed without the companies doing anything to secure it. Normalcy during and after the pandemic is unlikely to be the same as what people think it is. There’s the concept of the new normal. Then, there’s the next normal. Some are also floating the idea of never normal.

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COVID-19 forced businesses across the globe to rapidly adopt remote work in order to adhere to social distancing and stay-at-home orders. For some companies, this transition was seamless, especially those that already implemented cloud and the necessary supporting tools within their organizations. Others struggled to adapt their workforces to this highly remote, cloud-first environment. In fact, 41 percent of enterprises have not taken any steps to secure access for their remote workers despite the fact that 65 percent enable personal devices to access managed applications.

To quickly support remote work, organizations were spurred to adopt cloud and allow employees to access the corporate network from unmanaged devices. However, cloud and BYOD environments call for specific security solutions, and organizations that failed to simultaneously implement the necessary controls also expose themselves to more risks, including insider threats. Even once stay-at-home orders are lifted and some businesses choose to return to the workplace, COVID-19 had such an impact on the way we work, making it likely that the following post-pandemic predictions may occur.

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In the first quarter of this year, DDoS attacks rose more than 278 percent compared to Q1 2019 and more than 542 percent compared to the previous quarter.

This is among the findings of the Nexusguard Q1 2020 Threat Report. Researchers attribute the sharp rise in incidents to malicious efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, causing DDoS attacks to interrupt service for large companies and individuals alike.

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In the past six months, COVID-19 has evolved from a speck on the world radar to a full-blown pandemic. While it has claimed the lives of many and shed a massive spotlight on some of the major issues in healthcare, it has also served as a catalyst for innovation.

As with nearly every element of the healthcare system, applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have also been transformed by the pandemic. Although the power of machine learning and AI was being put to significant use prior to the Coronavirus outbreak, there is now increased pressure to understand the underlying patterns to help us prepare for any epidemic that might hit the world in the future.

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IBM's Center for Open-Source Data and AI Technologies (CODAIT) is releasing a new toolkit that helps developers and data scientists answer questions about the pandemic.

COVID notebooks is designed to help with tasks including obtaining authoritative data on the current status of the outbreak, cleaning up the most serious data-quality problems, collating the data into a format amenable to easy analysis with tools like Pandas and Scikit-Learn, and building an initial set of example reports and graphs.

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With governments around the world rolling out contact tracing in order to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, access management company Okta has commissioned a survey of 12,000 people across six counties to discover how consumers feel about data privacy and identity.

It finds that 84 percent of Americans are worried that data collection for COVID-19 containment will sacrifice too much of their privacy. A majority say they are uncomfortable with personally identifiable information (67 percent), bluetooth data (57 percent), medical data (53 percent), and location data (52 percent) being collected for COVID-19 purposes.

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The global pandemic has intensified the importance of networks, with more companies and individuals taking their worlds almost entirely online. But how is this affecting the teams that run them?

A new report from network operations specialist Kentik based on a survey of over 200 network professionals around the world shows that there's a mixed picture on productivity. 47 percent report feeling more productive while working from home, while 20 feel less productive and 33 percent say they have had no change in productivity.

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We see the European market today as the hottest area of the global cloud in a pivotal moment. While US cloud giants battle for world domination, China is building its "Great Cloud," Russia is testing its sovereign internet, and Europe is busy creating its own digital sovereignty.

The EU recently declared a massive digital transformation for its economy in the next decade where cloud and AI technologies will play an essential role. So what exactly can we expect from the European cloud industry in the short term?

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With stay at home orders and the sudden need to securely share sensitive documents from employee’s homes, there has been a significant demand for a surprising technology: the digital fax. Despite industry-wide efforts to digitally transform, the physical fax is still a very common and necessary piece of technology for many organizations.

In fact, 89 percent of small to medium-sized businesses still use faxes in one form or the other, and faxing still dominates communication in several fields. For example, faxing accounts for 79 percent of all communication in the medical industry. These same organizations have been scrambling to support the abrupt shift to remote work and have had numerous roadblocks in the process.

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