The country’s former top cyber spy said the pandemic has created conditions that have left companies more vulnerable to cybercrime than they previously were, the Financial Times (FT) reported.
Ex-National Security Agency head Michael Rogers shared the assessment prior to appearing at an event FT is hosting.
Because so many employees are working remotely, Rogers told FT, “the attack surface has just exploded.”
“Remote access is being executed on a level that is nowhere near the historic norms of the past, and that’s pretty much across all business sectors,” he said, according to the report, adding that the fact that employees use the same devices for personal and work use exacerbates the problem.
Rogers ran the NSA from 2014 to 2018 and now is a director at a consultancy called CyberCube that works with insurance companies.
FT stated that Rogers also said web searches for COVID-19 information can lead to sites that expose users’ data. The hacking technique is called “spear fishing.”
“There’s a much greater propensity among user populations now to access links or respond to emails that they believe are making them smarter about…
