Open Access

ARTICLE

Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cybersecurity Perspective

Mohammed Baz¹, Hosam Alhakami², Alka Agrawal³, Abdullah Baz⁴, Raees Ahmad Khan^3,*

1 Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computers and Information Technology, Taif University, P.O. Box 11099, Taif, 21944, Saudi Arabia
2 Department of Computer Science, College of Computer and Information Systems, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, 21955, Saudi Arabia
3 Department of Information Technology, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, 226025, Uttar Pradesh, India
4 Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer and Information Systems, Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah, 21955, Saudi Arabia

* Corresponding Author: Raees Ahmad Khan. Email:

Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing 2021, 27(3), 641-652. https://doi.org/10.32604/iasc.2021.015845

Received 20 November 2020; Accepted 25 December 2020; Issue published 01 March 2021

Abstract

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.

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