The number of COVID-19-themed attacks has increased significantly over the past couple of months, but they represent only a fraction of daily threats, security firms say.
Just as the
joint alert issued on Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) noted, the overall levels of cybercrime did not increase, despite the massive spike in COVID-19-related themes.
According to Microsoft, every country in the world has seen at least one COVID-19-themed attack, with countries most affected by the outbreak seeing the highest volume of incidents. To date, China, the United States, and Russia have been hit the hardest, the company
says.
At the moment, the tech giant is seeing roughly 60,000 phishing emails that carry COVID-19 related malicious attachments or malicious URLs each day. However, given the millions of malicious emails observed on a daily basis to target hundreds of thousands of users, that number amounts to less than two percent of the total volume of threats.
FireEye too has
observed a similar shift in the threat landscape, but notes that only two percent of the malicious emails it detected in March had a COVID-19 theme.
