Year after year, the number of reported data breaches keeps soaring. In fact, 8.4 billion records were exposed in the first quarter of 2020 alone, which is a 273% jump from the 4.1 billion records exposed in the first half of 2019. However, despite these alarming statistics, many users continue to have poor cyber hygiene habits, such as reusing passwords across multiple accounts.

Even before coronavirus infections spiked again across Virginia in early July and threatened to overwhelm healthcare institutions, another menace — COVID-19-themed phishing — was attacking the industry, albeit from another angle: their trustworthiness.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that in 2019, business email compromise (BEC) scams accounted for $1.7 billion or half the total cybercrime losses for that year.

The FBI also received 23,775 BEC scam complaints — an average of $75,000 per complaint.