COVID-19 has become a gold mine for cybercriminals. Months ago, the coronavirus pandemichas grown exponetially around the world and is expected to increase the number of infected in many countries, specially the USA who has more than 190.000 cases.

While we are fighting to contain the spreading of COVID-19 in the world, its encounter is quickly expanding. Countries are closing their borders and imposing lockdowns to towns, cities and states, companies are reducing their operations, therefore, real economy grows thin and the subterranean economy starts to activate. This is the precise moment where hackers around the globe prepare their malicious plays about COVID-19 and spread their own infections.

As a result of this pandemic, cybercriminals seize the opportunity to scam individuals, revealed by the Checkpoint Computing Security Agency, in which they expose the rising number of malicious websites, putting information about the pandemic only to steal your money and data.

Malicious domains related to coronavirus

Worldwide speaking, domains related to COVID-19 have a 50% chance of being malicious than other domains registered in the same amount of time and besides, they are higher than recent seasonal themes.

Since the beginning of january, across the lapsus in which the disease spreaded, 16.000 new COVID-19 related domains settled.

Only in the last 3 weeks, it was noticed a big increase in number of registrated domains; the average number of new domains is 10, more than the average number found in previous weeks. Also, 0,8% of these domains were malicious (93 websites) and other 19% were suspicious (more than 2.200 websites). In the last week, more than 6.000 new domains were registered, a 85% increase in comparison to the previous week.

In this situation, distrust any website that offers discounts, no matter how authentic is. To avoid being an online scam victim, our recommendations to prevent an unsafe behavior are:

• Be careful with e-mails and files received from unknown senders, specially if they offer sales or special discounts.

• Do not open any unknown attached file nor any link in the e-mail.

• Make sure to order products from an authentic source. One way to do it is to NOT open promotional links in the e-mails.

Remember that besides washing your hands regularly, it’s very important to mantain your cyber-hygiene.