We're at the right time to suffer online: hackers use a time of hardship and confusion to kick people. In this way, they are able to produce more confidence than the general rule. Yes, while the rest of the world is still figuring out how to overcome the epidemic, there are people all over the world who have better ways of fraud online, because it's the right time for them. And because we are in great danger, we have to be extra careful.
According to Barracuda Networks, it is a crime based phishing – Data theft, which activates the user's trust – They are up 667% from February to March, although since January more than normal growth has been noted. That is, attackers increase their working hours and take advantage of opportunities that are unique to them. And this integrates, effectively, with the coronavirus.
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We are in great danger because now many people work from home
A software of a company that performed the calculations, able to detect such attacks by email, was found nearby an attack involving half a million coronavirus in March. By our comparison, only 1,188 COVID-19 attacks were detected in February.
In addition, and because so many people work from home, we no longer process personal data on our network, but also a large amount of professional data. I mean, that if they were to compromise our security, hackers might be getting more of your personal information now in most cases. Therefore, our home network is more important than ever. This was revealed by Europol, which has already warned of the proliferation of this type of crime.
If we receive email communications from non-standard sources – for example, someone who claims to be from the human resources department of the company we work for, but without using a standard email address – suspicious, and don't hesitate to pick up the phone to confirm details, even more so if we're asked to click on a link or submit some personal data. Such attacks are very common, and even senior technical officials fall.
How to avoid falling into fake emails
People are very concerned about health. For this reason, scams have re-emerged as the World Health Organization, as Sophos has said. Specifically, email as large as WHO. In it, and because of the coronavirus, people are advised to learn the precautions they must take to avoid getting the disease.
As soon as we enter the link we will end up on a website similar to the World Health Organization, but we will be asked for the password of our email. Possibly, and out of fear of infection, many people will provide that sensitive information so that they can access the WHO's official content. If the WHO, our government, or any other institution sends you information about a coronavirus – or about another matter – they won't ask us for our email password.
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In one of the many posts, this time directed exclusively to Italy, it was attached a document that is suspected by WHO in an email. Once a user downloads and uses them, nothing happens, but as soon as the document system is enabled, macros are created, allowing access to your computer. In this particular case a on the horizon would encrypt all the files on our computer, asking us to be paid a ransom to recover all our information. This is a very common type of attack and that's why Microsoft has disabled macros automatically for all documents.
Search the Internet before clicking on any suspicious link
But it wasn't the end of the macro attack. This type of attack, in addition to using macros, it can be easily avoided by not working formal documents. If any organization sends us a document, it will be in a state of PDF and not to the editable DOC. Macros cannot be run on PDFs, which makes it very secure. And it's best not to download the file, but to go to Google and search in the news section of that organization, as we may have received an email from the public domain. It's safer if we go straight to their website instead of downloading questionable source files.
In addition, all attacks are phishing They can be blocked by carefully checking which email addresses they contact. If the email address is the same as the official public web site, the email we have access to may be genuine.. If an email comes to us from an email with unknown numbers and letters, let's be suspicious. When OMS sends an email, it will appear at the address ending in "@ who.int" and not in another email. We should always use this idea, and with this we can support ourselves by searching the organization's website on Google.
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Therefore, accepting that we are more vulnerable than usual is the first benefit we should receive to reduce this recurrence from attacks due to the coronavirus.
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