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Saturday, July 5, 2025

Beware of coronavirus-themed hackers

by

1866 days ago
20200425

The nov­el coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic presents an op­por­tu­ni­ty for ma­li­cious ac­tors to con­duct spearphish­ing cam­paigns, fi­nan­cial scams, and dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns via so­cial me­dia to col­lect sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion, steal mon­ey via fake do­na­tion web­sites, spread false in­for­ma­tion, and de­liv­er mal­ware to vic­tims.

Sev­er­al spearphish­ing cam­paigns since Jan­u­ary have false­ly rep­re­sent­ed var­i­ous health­care or­gan­i­sa­tions, in­clud­ing the US Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion and the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion (WHO).

In many cas­es, vic­tims re­ceive coro­n­avirus-themed emails re­quest­ing the vic­tim to open an at­tach­ment or click on a link to ob­tain de­tails about the coro­n­avirus. Once a vic­tim clicks on the at­tach­ment or link, they are di­rect­ed to a ma­li­cious web­site re­quest­ing the vic­tim to en­ter lo­gin cre­den­tials.

Law en­force­ment agen­cies have ob­served cam­paigns where­in vic­tims re­ceived hoax emails from what ap­pear to be the CDC re­quest­ing do­na­tions via Bit­coin to fund an “in­ci­dent man­age­ment sys­tem” in re­sponse to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. Agen­cies al­so ob­served in Feb­ru­ary a spearphish­ing cam­paign tar­get­ing Japan-based In­ter­net users with emails that ap­peared to pro­vide in­for­ma­tion re­lat­ing to coro­n­avirus pre­ven­tion. The emails in­clud­ed ma­li­cious Mi­crosoft Of­fice files that up­on open­ing would ini­ti­ate the down­load of a so­phis­ti­cat­ed Tro­jan known as Emotet.

US of­fi­cials have re­leased state­ments ad­vis­ing Rus­sia is like­ly be­hind coro­n­avirus dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns that are be­ing spread via so­cial me­dia. Re­ports in­di­cate thou­sands of Twit­ter, Face­book, and In­sta­gram ac­counts have been used to spread false in­for­ma­tion about the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic.

The Naval Crim­i­nal In­ves­tiga­tive Ser­vice (NCIS) is a fed­er­al law en­force­ment agency that in­ves­ti­gates felony crime, pre­vents ter­ror­ism, and pro­tects se­crets for the US De­part­ment of the Navy.

NCIS em­ploys ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2,000 per­son­nel, in­clud­ing 1,000 fed­er­al spe­cial agents, in 41 coun­tries and 191 lo­ca­tions around the world.


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