As businesses adapt to support a primarily remote workforce, they must also secure network connections to protect their people, assets, and customers from cybercriminals who consider the global circumstances an opportunity to prey on emotional and technical vulnerabilities across distributed work environments.

When businesses around the world changed the way they worked in response to COVID-19, cybercriminals ramped up their efforts to corrupt corporate networks with increased phishing, spoofing, distributed denial of service (DDoS), malware, and other malicious attacks.

Cybersecurity professionals must stave off almost constant attempts to breach network security in normal times. During a global crisis, the efforts from cybercriminals multiply exponentially as they seek to expose technical vulnerabilities and play on people’s emotions. We need to look no further than our own data to see the prevalence of hacking attempts — about 87% of the 1.5 billion emails Comcast Business processes every year are some sort of phishing attempt to lure people to click through to a spoofing site where malware would download to their device. Since lockdowns began in mid-March, we’ve seen those numbers climb even higher.