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APWG Profiles the Mutation of Identity Theft Attacks in the Age of COVID-19
May 2020 by APWG
The APWG’s new Phishing Activity Trends Report for Q1 2020 reveals several ways in which cybercriminals have taken advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic. These include coronavirus-themed phishing and malware attacks against workers, healthcare facilities, and the recently unemployed.
In April 2020, APWG members reported 1,054 attacks against Zoom, the popular videoconferencing application being used for remote work, distance learning, and telemedicine. This was up from eight reports lodged ithe APWG’s eCrime eXchange clearinghouse of cybercrime event data in March, an extraordinary, if unprecented, increase in abuse against a single brand in such a narrow time frame. Some of the attacks were phishing attacks, in which phishers emailed out fake Zoom videoconferencing meeting notifications. Other attacks offered Internet users the opportunity to download the Zoom client, but delivered malware files instead.
APWG member Agari documents how criminals have used COVID-19 as a way to trick companies into transferring money as part of “Business Email Compromise” or BEC attacks. “Our data also indicates that coronavirus-themed phishing attacks started spiking the week of March 8.
That was the same time that COVID-19 started to spike as a topic of general public interest according to Google Trends,” said Crane Hassold, Senior Director of Threat Research at Agari.
APWG member RiskIQ has tracked how criminals have targeted healthcare facilities with ransomware attacks, especially smaller facilities with less than 500 employees. These healthcare providers are especially vulnerable to extortion because they cannot tolerate any disruption to their operations during the pandemic, and do not have large IT security budgets.
In Brazil, APWG member Axur traced a phishing scam called auxiliocorona.online, which targeted people looking for unemployment benefits.
In other news, the total number of phishing sites detected in the first quarter of 2020 was 165,772, up from the 162,155 observed in the fourth quarter of 2019. The number of brands attacked in the first quarter was also larger than in the previous quarter, peaking at 374 reported in January and ending in March with 344. Also, APWG member RiskIQ investigated how some domain names used for phishing that were reported to large hosting providers can stay unmitigated for months.
