Coronavirus and cyber fraud overview: how to protect yourself in the online space

25 Mar 2020

Fraudsters try to take advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made many people around the globe work from home and use online services. In this article, we will try to identify every type of scam you can face in these hard times and also tell you how to protect yourself and not become the victim of online scheming.

Stealing money from your bank account

Those attacks have been the trend among fraudsters even before pandemic times, but coronavirus brought many new users to those services, which never transferred money online before and they are the most vulnerable victims.

Right now many people donating to coronavirus related charities and scammers can send you emails pretending they are, for instance, fund helping infected elderly people. Do not trust those emails and never share your debit or credit card information to do the donation. Check it twice beforehand.

Another piece of advice: never use a debit card for online purchases, because it would be harder to get your money back once you send it to the fraudulent service. Many services mimicking for food delivery or online cinema have popped up during coronavirus quarantine and they all want users to fill in personal data and credit card information. Double-check the service, even if they offer to purchase an unlimited number of movies for $1 and the offer is valid only 24 hours. Once the fraudsters know credit card or debit card data they can steal a large amount of money.

Attacks on the remote employees’ personal devices

COVID-19 has ended up a top-of-thoughts trouble dominating daily lives, and the toll it’s taking on corporations from every enterprise is climbing. In an attempt to include the rapidly-spreading virus and to preserve their personnel, many corporations are restricting travel and asking, or even requiring, their employees to work from home. But there are safety risks and obstacles which might lead to corporate data leak. What should the present remote workers consider?

Be careful when using public WiFi to access sensitive data/fill in the passwords. Information shared in unsecured public connections can easily be stolen by hackers. So it seems to be the best idea to really stay at home and not go to work in a co-working space, coffee shop or city park.

You should make sure that your company uses endpoint security. Simply, every device that has a connection to the corporate network is an ability access vector for a cybercriminal. All the remote devices accessing corporate networks or intranet should be protected.
Maintaining information privateness and integrity when using for work your personal device. Retaining ongoing statistics privacy is challenging because of the boom in each targeted assault and human error. You should not store statistics on a personal device and try to hold the whole job-related information in a secure cloud or online drive. A decentralized work environment also increases the chance of misplacing or losing gadgets. Preventative measures on these threats include putting in software wherein sensitive facts are stored that allows the enterprise to delete all the sensitive data from the device remotely.

Phishing emails

There are many phishing emails with Coronavirus related topics. Do not even open those: most of them are not from the local authorities but from scammers. Also do not click on any links even if you received an email from your provider or food delivery service. Clicking on the link might install a spying program on your computer which will lead to your personal data leak.

What’s important to remember for your own cybersecurity during the quarantine

There are simple measures to keep your private and work data safe these times.

When it comes to phishing emails, avoid clicking on any links. Even if the sender looks familiar try to realize: does this email look suspicious? Is it urgently required for you to perform some action? If yes, those are the features of online fraud.

If you shop online, first of all, look for “https” in the domain name. If there is no such thing, it might be a scammer sight just copying the original one. Also, look for spelling errors on the website and for subdomain: amazon.com is not the same with amazon.org. And better avoid shopping in the new online stores you have never seen before.

Better ignore too generous online offers and vaccinations. Those might be fraudster’s attacks too.

Share this information with your friends and family, try not to panic, use only trusted services that you’re familiar with and stay home. This time will pass soon!