Many people have been coerced to mobile working and, therefore, to a plethora of online conferences during the pandemic. A considerable percentage of them is certainly not aware of the risks of social engineering via Zoom, WebEx, and so on. A minority must exert private hardware to process data from their companies. If this hardware is not protected by topical safeguards (like updated virus scanners or firewalls) the data privacy is vulnerable as well.

That is right Günter Fahrnberger

Providers of online collaboration systems have got the freedom to force users accept the terms and conditions that make data owners to forgo their rights to privacy or not use the systems. Users are often left with no option but accept.

This is worse especially when the users are not adept to using the systems safely. For example, children as far as elementary school are going online for video-based remote schooling. At this level, children are neither aware of dangers of online systems nor are they able to deal with one if it happens.

Another area is with contact tracing apps - a large proportion of a population needs to be on them to be effective, people's movements are tracked, and infrastructure to do tracking could be vulnerable. Summary with references:

Article Privacy versus safety in contact-tracing apps for coronaviru...

Dears Sisay Chala Günter Fahrnberger , Jeff Sedayao

In my opinion there is a cumulative of situations of very different natures:

- Teleworking, which leads to the use of personal computers and workers' personal networks, becomes vulnerable as many users do not have computers and personal networks with adequate security conditions.

- The explosion of online shopping. Many people already bought online, obviously. However, the range of products that confinement situations (or less interest in buying in physical space) may lead to the purchase of products in companies outside the typical range that users used before. This could mean buying from less secure online stores with less security and privacy guarantees.

- The use of applications (for necessity), such as Zoom, among many other applications of social / work interaction. This need arose suddenly and often without adequate training for its correct, responsible and attentive use of safety issues. This sparked an increase in the exploitation of these weaknesses. An example was the use of Zoom: Many users created sessions without the need for an access pass .... this led to many of these sessions being attacked as undue users ... with undue attitudes ...

Several other examples could be given.

This is a hot topic!

Kind Regards,

Carlos

Here is another relevant study: Article A Study on the Wide-Ranging Ethical Implications of Big Data...

Dear Sisay Chala,

A very good substantive question. During the SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) coronavirus pandemic, the scale of digitization and internationalization of remote communication processes, remote work, e-learning, online shopping and payments, etc., and many other aspects of communication processes, economic processes, increased, financial, social etc. The scale of using ICT, Internet and Industry 4.0 information technologies in these processes has increased. On the other hand, there are doubts whether the pace of improvement of cybercrime risk management systems, the risk of data transfer in the Internet, the risk of viruses and viruses and malware in smartphones used by users of the mobile internet banking application, etc. is keeping pace with the current progress determined by the increase in the digitization and Internetisation of communication processes. , economic, financial, social and other processes.

Best regards, Have a nice day, Stay healthy!

Dariusz Prokopowicz