The report also found a 26% drop in budgets within cybercrime, fraud, IT security and risk departments, and 40% of IT security teams had to reduce their budgets for important IT security.
“Fraudsters and cybercriminals seek to exploit fear, uncertainty and change, and the pandemic has offered them new opportunities to probe for weaknesses they can monetise and new ways to disguise their activity,” said Adrian Nish, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence's head of Cyber. He added that threat actors “are building increasingly advanced capabilities to target core banking systems and becoming more aggressive, harming victims’ ability to respond to attacks. Online criminals have reacted fast, adapting their approach to hunt out remote working security gaps and prey on the vulnerable.”