Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cybersecurity Perspective

Inspite of the world being at a complete standstill in the wake of unprecedented health emergency of COVID-19 pandemic, people have managed to retain their digital interactions through Information Technology. Cloud networks, departmental servers, data centres, and the digital devices have ensured that businesses and industries as well as workers across the world remain associated with each other and are connected to the organizations' data. In such a scenario, the requirements placed on digital frames have increased rapidly. While this has proved to be a boon in the combat against the spread of Coronavirus, alarming increase in the instances of cyber attacks has become a major bane today. To prevent an emergence of second crisis, cybersecurity needs to be upgraded to protect the data of the users and contain the rising cyber crimes. This upgradation will be done when the impact of COVID-19 on security will be estimated. Hence this research is an attempt to gauge and analyse the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on cybersecurity. Various aspects of cybersecurity that have been affected by the pandemic have then been ranked in the descending order of severity quantitatively by the help of multi-criteria decision-making problem solving technique. Such a thorough and conclusive analysis will add to the experts' efforts in estimating the extent of the effects of COVID-19 on cybersecurity. The findings of this study will be an effective reference for designing, developing and implementing more secure mechanisms to protect the users from cyber invasions.