COVID-19 : Exploited for cyber attack
With the increase in the spread of the COVID-19 virus throughout the world the increase in the malware campaign using its name has seen a drastic increase.
Cyber-attackers around the world are looking at this situation as an opportunity to exploit using various ways. In the time where our lives revolve around technology, we are always at risk to lose our valuable data or compromising our privacy.
In the past few months, there have been several Coronavirus themed attacks. There have been phishing attacks that use the name of COVID-19 as a subject to get to people fall for this trap.
Emails are being sent out with the subjects such as ‘2020 Coronavirus Updates’, Coronavirus Updates, and many such subjects. There has also been SMS phishing where the SMS consists of a link that redirects you to the phishing page. As soon as we enter anything at these websites the information we have entered is sent to the host of that phishing page.
UK government-themed SMS phishing
UK government-themed phishing page
There have been seen much malware that exploits the name of Coronavirus to compromise the security of the system. A case has been seen where first an Email is sent with an attachment named as “COVID-19 prevention methods”, but when you download it, either it is a trojan virus which reads the keystrokes form your system and sends it to the attacker or it is a ransomware which further encrypts your system and then asks for money to decrypt the system. The malware affecting your system can also establish a connection with the attacker’s system and compromise your confidential data.
To protect ourselves from such attacks we should take a few steps such as not to click any link that comes in any SMS and you are not sure about the source of the SMS. We should also be aware of such Emails and should not download attachments form the Email that is sent to us by some unknown source. Another step that we can take is by not entering our emails, username, passwords, etc. on unknown websites. Also do not respond or interact with anything related to COVID-19 unless and until it is coming from some verified source or any Government organization.
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