Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, our systems have been capturing the changing patterns of security attacks experienced in the Security Operations Centres (SOCs) of our enterprise customers. The data points to a significant increase in state-sponsored APT attacks as nations look to take advantage of the perceived weaknesses of others, or to steal or destroy their COVID research from universities, pharmaceuticals and research institutes. At the SOC-level there has been a noticeable rise in alert volumes and anyone dealing with alerts manually has been overwhelmed. One way organisations look to ease the strain on their SOC is to introduce automation that can respond to these alerts through a range of playbooks – for example for phishing analysis. This playbook will stipulate that if an email looks like it contains malware it can be sandboxed for analysis and given a risk score. If that score indicates that there is malware present, the email is blocked and deleted. With automation, this only takes a few seconds to complete.  Read Less