The current pandemic has shown us what humanity stands for: kindness, care, sharing, giving and all the great values that we have as a global community, especially in hard times. In these times of need, there are multiple initiatives that are being driven by individuals and organizations alike asking for help — both in kind and cash. And, as one would expect, these initiatives are being communicated digitally.
Cybercriminals, who are notorious for riding trending news and emerging issues, have been watching matters unfold and developing their attacks in context with a large variety of updates and initiatives lined with the current pandemic. As a result, IBM X-Force Research has been seeing a significant number of new malicious domains related to COVID-19 appear in the wild since late February 2020, based on Quad 9 data (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Number of new DNS record related to COVID-19, based on Quad 9 data
Phishing Campaigns on the Rise
Our digital life has never been so central, and the pandemic has accelerated the remote workplace digitization process we were going through as a society. Students of all ages are now taking more online classes, parents are working from home, shopping is now mostly done online and many restaurants are taking online orders only.
Our digital adversaries are leveraging this unique opportunity, and we can see it in the volume and speed of new threats emerging. Many of the new COVID-19-themed domains we have detected (Figure 1) represent genuine initiatives, but there is also a significant portion of domains that have been set up by criminal actors for phishing.
According to IBM X-Force Research, the number of malicious domains related to COVID-19 has grown exponentially (Figure 2) between February and March 2020. Many ar ..
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