How Coronavirus Panic Created a Perfect Opportunity for Cyberattacks in Crucial Sectors?

In tough times like this, there is always someone out there looking for a weak spot to attack their enemy. The impact of Coronavirus today has devastated the socio-economic and political sectors; it has disrupted the commercial industry entirely, which has led to the fall of global trade and commerce, and unmistakably the panic and the terror among the people. Few people are already aware of this, but unfortunately, there still exist several people who are not aware of the fact that hackers are using it as an opportunity to exploit this vulnerability by launching cyberattacks.

For instance, recently, the US Department of Health and Human Services suffered a cyberattack while it was dealing with the coronavirus situation. However, none of the website’s data and information was compromised. Still, according to the officials, hackers responsible for the attack are state-sponsored, looking for it as an opportunity to attack the working of the US departments and institutions. In other incidents, cyberattacks under the name of ‘Wuhan Coronavirus’ were launched in many countries. According to Kaspersky experts, ten files with the names of ‘coronavirus-spread’ contain malware, and file-encrypting infections are barging into systems and corrupting them.

The Potential Target Areas

1. Political: Cyber attacks can be launched on prominent political infrastructures like government ministries and health departments with the use of false information and misinformation. The latest DDoS attack on the US Department of health is just a beginning. False reports of ‘nationwide lockdown’ or ‘nationwide quarantine’ appeared in many countries like India and the US. The government is continuously working to expose these fake news by launching an official caution advisory on their websites requesting the public not to trust or share unverified information.

2. Criminal: The hackers are looking at it as an opportunity to launch cyberattacks. According to Checkpoint’s Global Threat Index, “hackers around the globe have found the Coronavirus serving them well as an enabler for their activities. They are still riding the wave of the epidemic. Our Global Threat Index for January 2020 shows cyber-criminals are exploiting interest in the global epidemic to spread malicious activity, with several spam campaigns relating to the outbreak of the virus.”