Situational Awareness – Coronavirus Cyber Compendium, May 05, 2020

Coronavirus cyber activity hasn’t abated. Today we bring you more scam highlights and key developments, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s launch of “Operation Stolen Promise” and other initiatives in an attempt to combat these growing numbers of fraud attempts. This week’s COVID-19 Scam Roundup by Tripwire also covers another malicious coronavirus tracking map, more themes pretending to be WHO, and unscrupulous pet scammers on Craigslist. And if this isn’t more concrete proof that ploys are the same, scammers have repackaged the delivery failure notification scam; according to Kaspersky, most of these ruses install spyware or backdoors on victims computers. In a moving post, ICS security expert Dale Peterson shares miscellaneous Newtonian musings on inertia and its relation to OT security, IT security, and COVID-19.

Also in today’s compendium:

• COVID-19 Key Developments from risk intelligence organization Flashpoint
• COVID-1 9: Cloud Threat Landscape from Unit 42 researchers at security firm Palo Alto
• COVID-19 Phishing Update from anti-phishing experts Phishlabs

Finally, while not coronavirus specific, the National Governors Association (NGA) has selected seven states to participate in a workshop to create strategic plans to address statewide cybersecurity governance, critical infrastructure cybersecurity, statewide cyber disruption response planning, cybersecurity workforce development and state-local partnerships in cybersecurity. Colorado, Michigan, Mississippi, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee will participate in Workshops to Advance State Cybersecurity from August to December 2020.