CITON SECURITY TEAM
Thanks to Marcus Spiske for his artwork
Christmas came early in 2020 for the hacking, ransomware, and phishing community. The arrival of a worldwide pandemic meant that the manufacturers of “threat” were able to put aside the “inheritance” emails and place all their efforts into leveraging COVID-19 to solicit netizens to click their way to an attack.
This is an unfortunate side-effect of the current pandemic but it raises the question, who works toward limiting the effects of these attacks?
CRN recently reported the a U.S. District court order permitted Microsoft to seize and take control of specific domains used by cybercriminals who had used coronavirus phishing campaigns to target Microsoft customers.
The cybercriminals had crafted the attacks, using deceptive messages about the pandemic to “induce targeted victims to click on malicious links.” From there the hackers could take control of previous credential use.
Microsoft’s immense size and resource-rich teams were able to identify and take legal action to control the domains associated with the attacks. This level of customer care is the first indication we have seen from our vendor partners that they are willing to go to great lengths to secure client data.
While this cat and mouse game will remain part of our daily lives for the foreseeable future it is refreshing that we can help mitigate the attack potential by layering security and partnering with vendors like Microsoft who have made a commitment. through action, to securing our data.
