Quote:Cyberattackers have reached a peak of sending 1.5 million malicious emails per day related to the COVID-19 pandemic over the course of the last three months, according to new research.
Research from Forcepoint analyzing coronavirus-themed attacks between Jan. 19 to April 18 found cybercriminals adjusting threat levels to evolve with pandemic and typical employment trends.
Researchers sifted through their telemetry for the keywords “COVID” and “corona” in URLs accessed directly over the web or embedded with an email, according to a blog post posted Tuesday by Stuart Taylor, senior director of X-Labs at Forcepoint.
They noticed that there was an “undercurrent of browsing requests to legitimate COVID- or coronavirus-themed URLs” beginning in mid-January, that related to either tracking sites set up to share data points or news websites, he wrote. This shows the public’s initial interest in the pandemic, and would have been the first alert to threat actors that a trend existed that could be exploited.
This activity peaked during the first two weeks in March as governments around the world began implementing lockdown efforts and employees began working remotely, according to the post. Not coincidentally, this is when threat activity began in earnest, Taylor noted.
“We saw a rise in unwanted emails (malicious, spam or phishing) containing embedded URLs using the keywords of ‘COVID’ or ‘corona,’ from negligible values in January 2020 to over half a million blocked per day the end-of-March onwards,” he wrote in the post.
During peak volumes, researchers dentified 1.5 million total COVID-related emails per day, signifying both legitimate and malicious traffic related to the current global crisis, according to Forcepoint.
Read more: https://threatpost.com/cyberattackers-1-...ay/154970/
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