The Covid-19 pandemic is no impediment to cybercriminals, with hackers attacking businesses more than 22 million times worldwide during the last week.

According to data compiled and analysed by Atlas VPN, nearly two-thirds of the hacking attempts were malware attacks, which use software to either steal users’ files or encrypt them before charging a ransom to decrypt them.

Attacks monitored also include phishing and Command & Control (C&C) attacks.

Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by pretending to be a trusted figure, such as a work colleague.

A C&C attack is when hackers attempt to take over control of a system and then steal or delete data. C&C attacks can also be used as a part of a phishing scam or a way to infect the network with malware.

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Atlas VPN extracted and organised the data acquired from Akamai to measure cybercrime activity globally over the last week.

On average, there were 3.26 million cyberattacks daily throughout last week. Hackers carried most cyberattacks on April 15, with a total of over 3.6 million intrusion attempts, mostly in the form of malware attacks.

During the last 30 days, cybercriminals tried to infiltrate corporate networks nearly 100 million times, 58% of which used malware.

C&C attacks were the second most common type used by hackers, with over 27 million attacks in the last 30 days. Phishing scams are the least common type of attacks used by hackers, with a total of over 15 million attacks in the same time-frame.

Akamai services around 15-30% of web traffic worldwide, meaning that they are able to detect less than one-third of the total attacks. Taking this into account, Atlas VPN said that a conservative estimate of the total volume of hacker attacks on business per month could reach 300 million.

As Akamai only catches 15% of cyber-attacks globally, then the number of actual attacks happening per month could reach as much as 600 million.

At least 7.9 billion records, including credit card numbers and other highly sensitive information, were exposed through hacker attacks worldwide in 2019.

Atlas VPN warns that due to the increased internet usage and more people working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic, 2020 could be a record year for both hacker attacks and the number of records breached.