For one, COVID-19 has shed new light on the social engineering abilities of cybercriminals, who are taking advantage of the staying power of the pandemic in news cycles. Employees and consumers are still apt to click on a malicious link that purports to offer new information or insight into the coronavirus, said David Emm, principal security researcher at Kaspersky.
“Social engineering has always been one of the key attack vectors. What COVID-19 provides is a more persistent topic [than] Black Friday or the Olympics. Plus, you have a huge pool of potential victims [impacted by COVID-19], so it’s the perfect storm,” Emm said. “Criminals’ approach has pretty much been the same, but a lot of people have been forced to work from home. Here in the UK, it’s about 48%. That’s a lot of people who don’t have the protective ring of a corporate network around them.”
For example, phishers have pretended to be the World Health Organization offering information on the virus, or a delivery company with status on an order, or an agency giving out assistance to people—all of which can cause people to become curious and open malicious links.
Merium Khalid, senior cybersecurity analyst at SKOUT Cybersecurity, noted a marked increase in the number of legitimate documents and software platforms and websites that have PDFs embedded with malicious links—noting that it’s also estimated that 18 million COVID-19 phishing emails are being blocked each day.
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