COVID-19 | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Coronavirus crisis introduces a heavy burden on the CISOs with the collective impact of a mass transition to working remotely coupled with a surge of cyberattacks that strive to monetize the general chaos. Security vendors, unintendedly, contribute to this burden by a relentless generation of noise in the form of attack reports, best practices, tips, and threat landscape analysis. Here we have a new " CISO Checklist for Secure Remote Working " ( download here ) that has been built to assist CISOs in navigating through this noise, providing them with a concise and high-level list of the absolute essentials needed to ensure their organization is well protected in these challenging times. The Coronavirus quarantine forces us to face a new reality. It is critical to acknowledge this new reality in order to understand how to successfully confront these changes. Make no mistake – these changed apply to any organization, regardless of its former security posture. For exa...

As people increasingly work from home and online communication platforms such as Zoom explode in popularity in the wake of coronavirus outbreak, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the spike in usage by registering new fake "Zoom" domains and malicious "Zoom" executable files in an attempt to trick people into downloading malware on their devices. According to a report published by Check Point and shared with The Hacker News, over 1,700 new "Zoom" domains have been registered since the onset of the pandemic, with 25 percent of the domains registered in the past seven days alone. "We see a sharp rise in the number of 'Zoom' domains being registered, especially in the last week," said Omer Dembinsky, Manager of Cyber Research at Check Point . "The recent, staggering increase means that hackers have taken notice of the work-from-home paradigm shift that COVID-19 has forced, and they see it as an opportunity to deceive, lure,...

Preying on public fears, the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is proving to be a goldmine of opportunity for attackers to stage a variety of malware attacks, phishing campaigns, and create scam sites and malicious tracker apps. Now in a fresh twist, third-party Android app developers too have begun to take advantage of the situation to use coronavirus-related keywords in their app names, descriptions, or in the package names so as to drop malware, perpetrate financial theft and rank higher in Google Play Store searches related to the topic. "Most malicious apps found are bundle threats that range from ransomware to SMS-sending malware, and even spyware designed to clean out the contents of victims' devices for personal or financial data," Bitdefender researchers said in a telemetry analysis report shared with The Hacker News. The find by Bitdefender is the latest in an avalanche of digital threats piggybacking on the coronavirus pandemic. Using Coronavirus-Relat...

The Coronavirus is hitting hard on the world's economy, creating a high volume of uncertainty within organizations. Cybersecurity firm Cynet today revealed new data, showing that the Coronavirus now has a significant impact on information security and that the crisis is actively exploited by threat actors. In light of these insights, Cynet has also shared a few ways to best prepare for the Coronavirus derived threat landscape and provides a solution ( learn more here ) to protect employees that are working from home with their personal computers because of the Coronavirus. The researchers identify two main trends – attacks that aim to steal remote user credentials and weaponized email attacks: Remote User Credential Theft The direct impact of the Coronavirus is a comprehensive quarantine policy that compels multiple organizations to allow their workforce to work from home to maintain business continuity. This inevitably entails shifting a significant portion of the wor...

As the world comes to grips with the coronavirus pandemic , the situation has proven to be a blessing in disguise for threat actors, who've taken advantage of the opportunity to target victims with scams or malware campaigns. Now, according to a new report published by Check Point Research today and shared with The Hacker News, hackers are exploiting the COVID-19 outbreak to spread their own infections, including registering malicious Coronavirus-related domains and selling discounted off-the-shelf malware in the dark web. "Special offers by different hackers promoting their 'goods' — usually malicious malware or exploit tools — are being sold over the darknet under special offers with 'COVID19' or 'coronavirus' as discount codes, targeting wannabe cyber-attackers," the cybersecurity firm said. COVID-19 Discounts: Exploit Tools for Sale The report comes following an uptick in the number of malicious coronavirus-related domains that hav...