Cybersecurity Impacts of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Italy

The Covid-19 pandemic has pushed companies to the extensive use of digital services, to implement home working and provide online services to people in lockdown. As a consequence, it is interesting to study how this has affected the number, kind and distribution of cybersecurity attacks. This paper gives an empirical evaluation of the cybersecurity attacks at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, based on data collected from the questionnaires of the annual Digital Attacks Observatory. It shows that the overall number of attacks has not increased, but attacks have affected smaller companies than before. This can be explained with the fact that the Italian industrial scenario is mostly populated by small and medium enterprises, that have been obliged to a quick reconversion of their IT systems and typically lack the necessary cybersecurity culture.