DDoS attacks intensify in 2020 -- driven in part by COVID-19 and 5G

Cybercriminals had a busy year in 2020, with rapidly increasing numbers of distributed denial of service (DDoS) weapons, widespread botnet activity, and some of the largest DDoS attacks ever recorded. As COVID-19 drove an urgent shift online for everything from education and healthcare, to consumer shopping, to office work, hackers had more targets available than ever -- many of them under protected due to the difficulty of maintaining security best practices in an emergency scenario. At the same time, the ongoing rollout of 5G technologies has accelerated the proliferation of IoT and smart devices around the world, making unsuspecting new recruits available for botnet armies to… [Continue Reading]