Almost 60% of Brazilians are staying at home, and social isolation has grown in recent weeks, as shown by data from In Loco, a geolocation technology company whose software is embedded in more than 60 million mobile phones.

It is possible that never in the history of the country have so many people had to work from home at the same time. And because so many people had to work from home at the same time, not all companies had the time to adjust, as quickly, the protection system around corporate information, which started to be accessed by employees from home. At the same time, curiosity and panic around the subject of coronavirus has increased.

These two factors, a new workplace and pandemic fear, have also created new breaches for hacker attacks. Proof of this is that ISH Technology, a company that has been operating in cybersecurity for 24 years, has recorded an increase in the number of attacks in Brazil of 220% in the last three months compared to the last quarter of 2019. The growth in the number of invasions was recorded mainly in companies in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais and the Federal District.

Among the most common scams are those related to terms such as "COVID-19" and "coronavirus" in fake news links and in fake apps that promise to show in real time where and which are the confirmed cases of the disease.

These are criminals who are taking advantage of these vulnerabilities, both in technology and behaviour, to make victims. Add to this the fact that many companies do not invest enough in cyber security to ensure that home office employees are not gateways for hackers.

Today companies apply rules for devices to find anomalies. But if, in the home office, a hacker steals an employee's data and manages to break into the company's system, he will probably not be detected. On the contrary, he will be mistaken for a legitimate user. That is why the security policy needs to be centred not only on technological tools, like an antivirus, but on people.