If you’ve been following the news in 2020, and let’s be fair, who hasn’t, you may have noticed – between the headlines of US election drama and burgeoning pandemic numbers – that cyber crime is well and truly on the rise.

From Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison’s alarming announcement in June, that a foreign government had been discovered undertaking “malicious” cyber attacks against Australian government agencies; to the numerous hacking scandals plaguing the 2020 US election race.

But it’s not just the largest organisations who are at risk of cyber attacks – many organisations and businesses moving to work-from-home arrangements earlier this year fell victim to opportunistic cyber criminals, making the most of easy access to remote IT systems.

In September, global IT and tech news site ZDNet, reported that there had been a “sharp rise in sophisticated hands-on hacking campaigns” in 2020, with the first half of the year showing more incidents than all of 2019.

The findings came from a report from cyber security company Crowdstrike, and were based on “potential hands-on intrusions” identified by their research team.

“The first half of 2020 saw 41,000 intrusions, a higher figure than the 35,000 detected during all of 2019, according to the company,” Danny Palmer, author of the ZDNet article reported.

“Hands-on campaigns are based around hackers gaining access to the network – often via leaked or stolen credentials to an employee account or an exposed RDP server – then using the legitimate access those accounts or systems offer to move across the network, gradually securing the means to gain more and more access.”