CYBER VID-19: How Coronavirus affected the Cyberspace?
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus.
Most people infected with the COVID-19 virus will experience mild to moderate respiratory illness and recover without requiring special treatment. Older people and those with underlying medical problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, and cancer are more likely to develop serious illness.
Cyber Criminals always strive to take advantage of all the disasters that occur in the world to create more and more methods that facilitate them to fraud that could oust millions of victims as a result of these attacks.
According to the new epidemic which called COVID-19 and also known as Corona Virus, many preventive measures have been taken worldwide to reduce and eliminate the spread of the virus, Many Countries are in a lockdown mode, everybody is practicing social distancing and quarantining themselves.
The world is in a complete panic because of these current events, and this is the ideal situation that all hackers and cybercriminals await in order to create malicious campaigns targeting many victims that end in defrauding and manipulating all those who have fallen into the trap of believing anything on the Internet in order to obtain More prevention methods or even more information about this global epidemic.
The threat is so high that Interpol has even issued a notice about the danger of financial fraud due to COVID-19.
Since January [The Start of COVID-19 spreading] Over 6000 Coronavirus related domain names have been registered globally.
And there were a lot of coincidences that in turn helped criminals in setting up such harmful campaigns targeting millions of victims, including that surgical masks and medical supplies like surgical gloves and hand sanitizers, are in such a high demand that a lot of retail stores have run out of stock which made it easy to create many, many fake online shops, websites, social media accounts and email campaigns which claim to sell these items.
Then the victim falls into the jaw that the hacker prepared and instead of receiving the promised masks, gloves, sanitizers, and supplies, victims have seen their money disappear into the hands of these cybercriminals. The UK for Example, there had been 105 reports to Action Fraud, the UK’s national reporting Centre for fraud and cybercrime, with total losses reaching nearly £970,000
Cybercriminals exploit human weakness to penetrate systemic defenses. In a crisis situation, particularly if prolonged, people tend to make mistakes they would not have made otherwise. Online, making a mistake in terms of which link you click on or who you trust with your data can cost you dearly.
Cybercriminals are extremely creative in devising new ways to exploit users and technology to access passwords, networks and data, often capitalizing on popular topics and trends to tempt users into unsafe online behavior.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt global health, economic, political and social systems, there’s another unseen threat rising in the Cyber space: the risk of cyberattacks that prey on our increased reliance on digital tools and the uncertainty of the crisis.
Finally, there is still no perception of how to mitigate those risks and control them, which increases their severity, because the world is now in a state of complete panic, until there is difficulty in ways to raise awareness against the dangers of this epidemic, so there is no space or place to educate against the dangers of these cyber-attacks.
BY Muhammad Gamal
Cybersecurity Senior Consultant
Secure Networks
