Through a adjunct statement from American and British authorities, released on April 8, a warning was issued regarding the increase in scams related to the new coronavirus, due to hackers and other fraudsters looking to benefit from the pandemic.
The statement from both the United Kingdom’s National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC) and the US Infrastructure and Cybersecurity Agency (CISA) called for caution – citing an increase in the number of scams since the pandemic broke out.
“Malicious people are using these difficult times to exploit and take advantage of other people and even companies,” said Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA.
THE modus operandi of attacks
These scammers, the statement warns, are mimicking remote workstations – such as the Zoom app – to take advantage of the growing demand for activities home-office. Instead of downloading the software, victims are tricked into downloading the malware (malicious program usually with virus-infected files).
Scams in the form of email are also abundant, according to the agencies, who mentioned messages pretending to be authorities in health, deceiving people and making them divulge personal information.
Tactics of Phishing similarly being applied through text messages. Fraudsters often draw victims’ attention through financial gain opportunities. Currently, with an increase in coronavirus support packages around the world, criminals have seen a chance to pose as officers allegedly responsible for handling financial aid – all to redirect victims to a website. phishing (which mimics in detail a suitable address in order to steal sensitive data).
A change in strategies
While there is an increase in scams related to the new coronavirus, the statement reports that levels of cybercrime have not actually increased.
Microsoft made a similar impression in an article published yesterday.
“It’s not that scammers suddenly have more resources to trick users; Instead, they are optimizing their current infrastructure, such as ransomware, phishing and other malicious tools, including the keyword COVID-19 to catch our click, ”said Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president, Microsoft 365 Security.
After analyzing millions of emails from phishing, Microsoft revealed that only 60,000 of them included any malware related to coronavirus.
“So our data shows that these threats against the background of COVID-19 are like updates to existing attacks that have been slightly altered to fit this pandemic. This means that we are seeing a change in approach methods and not an increase in attacks, ”added Lefferts.
It seems that the coronavirus is not only happy to bring down the economy but it also wants the money in its wallet.
Source: Decrypt
