(Posted on Behalf of Amit Ghodekar)
Covid-19 has taken the world under it completely. Millions of people are infected due to this Virus and millions have lost their life as well. Most of the countries in the world have announced a complete lock-down, approx 4.5 billion of people in the world are now in complete lock-down.
The world economy is facing its biggest challenge and so is mankind. While the world is searching a weapon to fight against this terror and evade this virus to save the mankind with the help of a medicine or a vaccine. Many are suspecting it as a biological war which is played by some biggies.
Many countries have taken decisive decisions to save the life of their people against this war at the same time many organizations in the world are helping their employees to work from home to maintain the productivity and business as well with the help of technology and video conferencing solutions. Technology is playing a key role to ensure that business is up & running.
Since the global outburst of this biological virus, the cyber criminals are also up there ante and they are utilizing this opportunity to perform various cyber-crimes. Cyber criminals are very quick to grab this opportunity to mint money with various products. (Similar to any business when they sense any new business opportunity they launch new products the cyber criminals have productize the opportunity and they make sure that they make money.
The beginning of this was phishing emails, the hackers saw that majority of people are affected by Covid - 19 they started sending emails. Phishing emails suppose to be from health agencies, counterfeit product offers and bogus charity donation requests. The hackers play very smart they sell product to netizens to test online if you are Covid - 19 infected or if they require medicine to cure from Covid - 19 or even online medical assistance for Covid - 19. All these are just done to make lot of money. Hackers didn't even spare the government as well,they created bank accounts similar to govt web pages etc. to collect donation for Covid - 19. Many people in the world found it too late that these were scams.
Hackers next target was healthcare organizations. After some reports indicated hospitals had been hit by ransomware, some hacker groups pledged to avoid hitting health care organizations, reports of attacks on WHO (not much info available) etc. were also in buzz for some time. The reports of Hacking incidents are coming from these industries.
Now the million dollar deal are waiting for the hackers since they sensed that most of the organizations in the world are lock-down and they are opting for work from home solutions for their employees they started exploiting end users and the VPN work from kind of solutions. Once they breached into the corporate network they steal the information and threatened the corporate to sell the information on dark web etc. Many corporate won’t have much options but to accept and pay money.
In between, attacks started on Insurance companies, Banks, Telecom, Govt etc. these attacks are in the form of DDOS and Malware etc. Many of the giant corporate are struggling to fight against this new Virus. Hackers are also making Ransomware attacks on big information technology companies and halting there operations so that they can pay ransom.
According to trend micro labs total 907K different types of spam messages were circulated. 737 new Malware were detected, 48K hits on malicious Urls with related Covid - 19. 220X increase in Spam emails, 260X increase in the hits on malicious URLs, thousands of new malicious domains on the name of Covid - 19. This data tells a lot.
While the world is fighting against saving the human life against Covid - 19 in a biological war. The hackers have made it a Cyber War. The Cyber criminals are utilizing this opportunity and make sure that they disturb and devastate the technology ecosystem and mint money. Till the world recovers from the Covid - 19 probably the Cyber war would take the world under it and after that the humans who will be alive might not have easy technology in their hand to survive..
Amit Ghodekar
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