Experts say 13% of all Q1 global phishing attacks COVID-19-linked

MOSCOW, Jun 16 (PRIME) – About 13% of all phishing attacks in January–March globally were related to the COVID-19 topic, information security firm Positive Technologies said on Tuesday in a report.

“Perpetrators picked up the topic of general concern about the coronavirus and started exploiting it for phishing letters. According to our calculations, in January–March, some 13% of attacks, in which cybercriminals used social engineering, were about the coronavirus,” Positive Technologies said.

“We’ve seen an increase in the number of phishing mailouts devoted to COVID-19 since the second half of January. The pandemic was used both for massive malicious campaigns and for sophisticated advanced persistent threats.”

In total, the number of attacks increased by 22.5% on the quarter in January–March, and 67% of attacks were targeted and 14% were against individuals.

“We expect that a rising number of attacks on remote jobs internationally. Due to a massive transfer to remote working, the companies will face soon more efforts to break into corporate accounts and exploit vulnerabilities in the systems of remote access. The threats are extremely urgent for the firms that have no strict password policy and regular software upgrade,” the company said.

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