USA: Covid 19 virus awakens criminal energies

USA: Covid 19 virus awakens criminal energies

In the USA, the Covid 19 virus is alarmingly arousing criminal energies. It is always astonishing that many citizens fall for simple tricks. Here are some examples:

A huge increase in malicious phishing emails

New York, 28.3.2020

Since the end of February, there has been a 667 percent increase in malicious phishing emails exploiting concerns about COVID-19.

According to a report released on Thursday by Barracuda Networks, 467,825 spear phishing attacks were recorded in March, with 9,116 of these being related to COVID-19, representing 2 percent of all attacks.

In February, the company identified only 1,188 COVID-19-related phishing attacks, and only 137 COVID-19 phishing attacks in January. There are four major types of COVID 19 phishing attacks: Fraud, brand imitation, extortion and compromise of business email.

In one particularly malicious attack campaign, the victim and his family were threatened with COVID-19 if they did not pay a ransom.

Serious intrusion into small office routers

Attackers hack into home and small office routers and redirect users to fake COVID 19 information Web sites to install password and credential stealing malware.

The affected routers are manufactured by Linksys and D-Link according to various reports. While it is not clear how the attackers gain access to the routers, Bitdefender researchers believe they are able to guess passwords used to secure the routers‘ remote management console or guess the credentials of users‘ cloud accounts.

The fake sites offer visitors an app claiming to provide the latest data and instructions on COVID-19 from the World Health Organization. Victims who click the download button to get the app receive data-stealing malware instead.