During a pandemic, cybercriminals take advantage of the human fear of the virus and thus try to extort data and financial resources.
According to Google, up to 18 million malicious COVID-19 emails are sent out by hackers every day. During a pandemic, cybercriminals take advantage of the human fear of the virus and thus try to extort data and financial resources.
The data provided by the concern relate to last week. According to the company, in addition to emails containing malware or phishing scams, there are approximately 240 million spam messages daily, which are also devoted to the topic of the coronavirus.
Some of the messages sifted out by the company’s filters are prepared in such a way as to impersonate the message of government institutions or, for example, the World Health Organization (WHO). Attempts to impersonate such entities are supposed to increase the chances of cybercriminals to successfully extort funds – emphasizes Google. It is also easier to trick the user into opening a legitimate, albeit fake, message that may allow hackers to install malware on the victim’s computer, among other things.
Phishing is also a popular technique used by computer scammers. In this way, cyber criminals steal company data from employees performing their duties remotely.
Google estimates that the company is currently successfully capturing and eliminating 99.9 percent of the company’s traffic with machine learning tools trained to recognize the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic. false
and harmful correspondence. However, specialists associated with the company advise users to never download attachments of unknown origin and to always check the authenticity of links to login forms in digital services. This helps protect against the installation of malicious software or phishing.
The FBI, and more specifically IC3, the Internet Crimes Division, reports that every day it receives about 3-4 thousand. reports of online crime. That’s a lot, and even more, if we put this number
in the context of just a thousand reports before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Of course, this is closely related to the fact that American users spend much more time online.
It is worth remembering that since the introduction of restrictions on movement in many countries, including the US, many people stay at home and their main activity is now in cyberspace. Naturally, this is an opportunity for all sorts of frauds and other criminals, so the level of reporting such cases to IC3 increases. What’s more, according to Tonya Ugoretz
from the FBI’s “cyber division”, many countries are looking for information about the virus and possibly a vaccine, and thus many institutions researching COVID-19 are vulnerable to cyber attacks.
