APTs Use Coronavirus as a Lure
by from IEEE Spectrum on (#55YJ6)
Threat actors are closely monitoring public events happening around the world, and quickly employing those themes in attack vectors to take advantage of the opportunity. That said, various Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups are using the coronavirus pandemic as a theme in several malicious campaigns.
By using social engineering tactics such as spam and spear phishing with COVID-19 as a lure, cybercriminals and threat actors increase the likelihood of a successful attack. In this paper, we:
- Provide an overview of several different APT groups using coronavirus as a lure.
- Categorize APT groups according to techniques used to spam or send phishing emails.
- Describe various attack vectors, timeline of campaigns, and malicious payloads deployed.
- Analyze use of COVID-19 lure and code execution.
- Get ready to dig into the details of each APT group, their origins, what they're known for and their latest strike.