Infrastructure Vulnerabilities During COVID-19

Critical Infrastructures and Services are Fragile. The Pandemic has caused the world to work from home and learn from home — using the technologies that had actually been available for at least the past decade.  Telemedicine, remote learning, and on-line education were among the early adopters of these technologies out of necessity. But even the Global 1000 businesses adapted and adopted quickly and have reported positive results regarding their increased productivity and meeting key performance criteria. And while our Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecommunications companies are trying to build more capacity in the system, they are also experiencing more and more outages, knocking us offline when we need to be online. The supporting digital infrastructures are fragile and, in addition to glitches and outages, malicious actors are taking advantage of our increased reliance on digital tools and broader exposure to cyber risks to ramp scam individuals, ransom businesses, disrupt critical infrastructures, and attack governments at all levels.