A crisis like this 'is actually a great launching pad for hackers and for malicious actors in cyber': Cybereason CSO

Cybereason CSO Roi Carmel joins Yahoo Finance’s On The Move to discuss cyber security concerns taking place during the coronavirus crisis.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: "The New York Times" reported yesterday that a number of people who have been trying to wait for their stimulus checks-- that they've actually been targeted by hackers who have then siphoned the money using data that was revealed in past hacks, not necessarily currently. So let's talk about this issue and much more-- what to be aware of right now-- with Roi Carmel. He is Cybereason Chief Strategy and Product Officer. He's joining us from Boston.

Roi, it's good to see you. So if someone is vulnerable because their information was hacked in the past, and now that person is applying for these benefits from the IRS before the person who it actually is can get there, is there anything they can do because it's sort of part of a past hack? Is there any recourse that they have now?

ROI CARMEL: Yeah, hi, Julie. Thanks for having me. I think what's important to really understand is that a crisis like this, just like any crisis, is actually a great launching pad for hackers and for malicious actors in cyber. We change our behavior and how we respond to either emails that we get or announcements that we see based on the situation around us.

And with more urgency and sense of urgency, we tend to make more mistakes. And so, if partial information of ours was leaked out or hacked before, and still, some missing information like a credit card or a specific password is still missing, it's much easier to get this information from us at this time of crisis by getting an email from what looks like a legitimate source specifically targeted for getting benefits or getting updates on COVID-19 and clicking on a link to get more of that information.

Hackers can use some of the information that they already have on us to gain credibility for that email and then get us to click on their link much more. We've seen phishing attacks go up 400% during this crisis. And so, that's a real threat that's happening right now.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Hey, it's Adam Shapiro. I was curious. The phishing attempts that you see-- is it just a wide net they're testing or are they hitting specific regions, say, of the United States that are hard-hit by the economic numbers?

ROI CARMEL: We're seeing both. We're seeing-- the ones that have always been widespread are just leveraging the COVID-19, as I said, to get us to respond in a less responsible way. It's very easy to create tools today to send phishing emails that seem like they're targeted specifically to you. But it's automatically generated, and it's widespread. And so, we're seeing some of those.

We're also seeing specific-- either nation-backed hackers or specific actors that are targeting even hospitals in this crisis and using the crisis to gain leverage and get the mistakes from the people that respond to those emails.

JULIE HYMAN: Roi, just hang on one second because I wanted to bring people some breaking news here. The "Financial Times" is reporting that the antiviral drug remdesivir, Gilead's drug that was talked about with some promise by some as a treatment for coronavirus, has flopped in its first trial. Again, this is according to the "Financial Times."

Gilead shares themselves are moving sharply lower after this headline. They're off by about 6%. And indeed, stocks overall have come down from the highs. Remember-- just a few minutes ago, I told you the S&P was up about 1 and 1/4%. Now, it's up just 6/10 of 1%. So it's cut its advance in half. We'll keep covering this for you but do you want to come back to this issue of cyber security. Dan Howley, I know you wanted to chime in on this.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, well, you know, outside of the hacks or the malware, phishing attempts that we're seeing as a result of the stimulus, we have a lot of people working from home right now. We are doing this from home, obviously-- all of us. Are you hearing any reports of stepped-up cyber attacks as a result of that? And are any companies seeing any intrusions that could be a result of people working from home and not taking enough security steps?

ROI CARMEL: The answer is 100% yes. We have-- we're seeing-- obviously, just like all of us, the workforce has been changing during this crisis to work from home. The infrastructure that is needed to work from home has not been put in place with enough time to scale up. And so, we do have some ad hoc systems that support the remote workforce, whether those are VPNs that some of us know and use for secure connections or any other authentication technology that people use to log into their networks.

Those infrastructure pieces were not really ready for this scale. And attackers are taking advantage of this. The other piece is really the network-- the home network and the mobile devices that we all have and use-- that are less protected than our corporate network. And we're using them a lot more than we have before. We're spending more time on them. We're sharing networks between our mobile device and our work device. And that is, again, an open attack surface for attackers.

And so, what we've done at Cybereason in the first week of this crisis is, started to educate our customers and our partners really how to cope with this change in workforce and how to leverage some of the existing capabilities that are out there by vendors, like Cybereason or others, to really tailor them to this remote workforce function that the corporate security office is not used to at this scale right now.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, just one more way that everyone has to adapt right now. Roi Carmel of Cybereason is the Chief Strategy and Product Officer there. Thank you, Roi, for your time-- appreciate it.