The COVID-19 virus epidemic has seen a 23% rise in visitors to UK independent ecommerce sites and similarly, on a global scale, many companies have transitioned to fully ecommerce-based business practice and are seeing an increase in online shoppers. Additionally, employees are either remote working, self-isolating or ill. This pivot in business continuity means websites are increasingly vulnerable to being attacked.

Data destruction is an aggressive attack technique observed in several nation-state campaigns. This technique under MITRE ATT&CK 1485, describes actions of adversaries that may “..destroy data and files on specific systems or in large numbers on a network to interrupt availability to systems, services, and network resources. Data destruction is likely to render stored data irrecoverable by forensic techniques through overwriting files or data on local and remote drives”.

Cyberattacks are never going away; in fact, things appear to be getting worse. The complexity of attacks has escalated, resulting in more sophisticated, targeted takedowns. Just look at the attacks in Baltimore, Atlanta, Florida, and Spain within the past few years. Organizations around the world have had their operations halted by ransomware, with some taking weeks to get back to normal.