The advent of COVID-19 appears to have set the stage for a ‘hackers holiday’ according to a report emanating from the regional telecommunications giant Digicel.
Digicel appears certain that the advent of the global pandemic has brought with it what a senior company official has described as “a sharp uptick in cyber-attacks based on the levels of vulnerability as well as the number of workloads that are going online,” a senior regional Digicel official is quoted as saying.
With sections of the banking community already facing confidence and credibility deficits on account of a groundswell of reports in some territories regarding the unexplained removal of significant sums of money from customers’ accounts, reports of hacking, unless these are addressed speedily, could send the regional banking sector into a condition of further jitteriness. What is also not likely to burnish the image of banks that are already victims of hackers is the comment attributed to Ative Ennis, Digicel’s Commercial Director of Business, that the banks neglect to disclose incidents of hacking on account of the fact that exposure could reveal “the level of credibility in that space.”
The Digicel official further disclosed that the findings of the probe suggest that the hacking activity that coincides with the pandemic is also targeting “government sites.”
The upsurge of hackings linked to the advent of COVID-19 was reportedly one of the issues discussed at a Webinar hosted last week by Digicel to discuss the findings of its May Business Survey in which more than three hundred business customers in Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad & Tobago, were interviewed.
