COVID-19 Update 4/22/2020

During the COVID-19 crisis, our analysts are tracking open-source information sources to keep our followers up to date with COVID-19 Cybercrime. Today’s report:

• The SBA notified nearly 8,000 business owners of the potential inadvertent disclosure of information, which included names, Social Security numbers, tax identification numbers, addresses, dates of birth, email, phone numbers, marital and citizenship status, household size, income, disclosure inquiry and financial and insurance information, according to a letter sent to business owners, which CNBC obtained.
• Providers of domain name registration services are under pressure to ensure they are doing all they can to prevent scammers from setting up fake websites to prey on people looking for information related to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Dark Reading report.
• Google’s Threat Analysis Group reported today: Across Google products, we’re seeing bad actors use COVID-related themes to create urgency so that people respond to phishing attacks and scams. Our security systems have detected examples ranging from fake solicitations for charities and NGOs, to messages that try to mimic employer communications to employees working from home, to websites posing as official government pages and public health agencies. Recently, our systems have detected 18 million malware and phishing Gmail messages per day related to COVID-19, in addition to more than 240 million COVID-related daily spam messages. Our machine learning models have evolved to understand and filter these threats, and we continue to block more than 99.9 percent of spam, phishing and malware from reaching our users.