April 8, 2020 By Rob Lefferts
Attackers are capitalizing on fear. We’re watching them. We’re pushing back.
Our inboxes, mobile alerts, TVs, and news updates are all COVID-19, all the time. It’s overwhelming and attackers know it. They know many are clicking without looking because stress levels are high and they’re taking advantage of that. That’s why we’re seeing an increase in the success of phishing and social engineering attacks. Attackers don’t suddenly have more resources they’re diverting towards tricking users; instead they’re pivoting their existing infrastructure, like ransomware, phishing, and other malware delivery tools, to include COVID-19 keywords that get us to click. Once we click, they can infiltrate our inboxes, steal our credentials, share more malicious links with coworkers across collaboration tools, and lie in wait to steal information that will give them the biggest payout. This is where intelligent solutions that can monitor for malicious activity across – that’s the key word – emails, identities, endpoints, and applications with built-in automation to proactively protect, detect, respond to, and prevent these types of attacks from being successful will help us fight this battle against opportunistic attackers.
Our threat intelligence teams at Microsoft are actively monitoring and responding to this shift in focus. Our data shows that these COVID-19 themed threats are retreads of existing attacks that have been slightly altered to tie to this pandemic. This means we’re seeing a changing of lures, not a surge in attacks. Our intelligence shows that these attacks are settling into a rhythm that is the normal ebb and flow of the threat environment: