The menace of coronavirus pandemic is accelerating significantly and hackers are capitalizing the element of fear to collect shear currency. They are creating thousands of websites as baits. According to the Check Point Research report, threat actors are registering phony COVID-19-related domains and selling them on discounted off-the-shelf malware on the dark web. In this article, we will delve into some essential details regarding the coronavirus-related bait sites. Here is some help.

Many in the digital security community are coming together to combat malicious actors during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global outbreak. One of the most visible of these new efforts is the COVID-19 CTI League. Made up of approximately 400 volunteers living in approximately 40 countries, the COVID-19 CTI League is working to block attackers from health care organizations and other medical facilities at this juncture.

Malicious actors are increasingly leveraging COVID-19 as a theme for new digital fraud attacks. In February 2020, for instance, Action Fraud received 21 reports of fraud relating to the coronavirus. This number of reports more than doubled to 46 between March 1 and March 13, 2020. Between March 14 and March 18, 2020, the United Kingdom’s national fraud reporting center collected 38 reports alone. Those 105 reports represented a collective total of £970,000 in losses.

With the technology today, electronic financial transactions offer a degree of convenience that simply cannot be provided by physical institutions. It’s a matter of being able to transfer money, make payments, and complete similar transactions—all without having to go to a bank or wait in line. While this brings immediacy to financial transactions, sometimes this convenience comes with a risk. The complicated nature of mobile money has the potential to compromise security.

In terms of cyber-attack vectors, spoofing is exactly what it sounds like. This term embraces a series of techniques aimed at masquerading an attacker or electronic device as someone or something else to gain the victim’s confidence. Whether it is used to deceive a user or to manipulate a computer system, this multi-pronged phenomenon is often at the core of social engineering hoaxes in general and phishing campaigns in particular.

The government of Puerto Rico has publicly announced that its Industrial Development Company has fallen victim to an email phishing scam. The government-owned corporation transferred $2.6 million to a fraudulent account after reportedly receiving an email that alleged a change to a bank account tied to remittance payments. The transfer was made on January 17, 2019, but officials only found out about the incident earlier this week.

As if Puerto Rico wasn’t having a hard enough time as it attempts to recover from a recession, the damage caused by devastating hurricanes in recent years, and a damaging earthquake last month, it now finds itself being exploited by cybercriminals. According to media reports, the government of the US island territory has lost more than US $2.6 million after falling for the type of email scam that has plagued companies and organisations around the world.

Up until now, some of PayPal users’ greatest fears in terms of cybersecurity were phishing scams aimed at obtaining their login credentials. In January of this year, PayPal confirmed a high-severity bug affecting the login form, with PayPal security investigator, Alex Birsan, finding a javascript file with what looked like a CSRF token and a session ID – which makes login information vulnerable to attackers.

The threats from data theft and fraud will continue to be a significant concern for all corporate entities in 2020. eCommerce sales, for example, are expected to reach almost one trillion dollars in the next three years, creating a growing opportunity for attackers to capitalize on fraud. A Juniper Research Report regarding online payment fraud trends estimated that digital card, not present fraud (CNP), one of several fraud categories, will reach $130 billion by 2023.