Characterizing the Landscape of COVID-19 Themed Cyberattacks and Defenses

TL;DR

This paper systematically characterizes COVID-19 themed cyberattacks, analyzing their sophistication and exploring defense strategies to better understand and mitigate this emerging cybersecurity threat.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of COVID-19 themed cyberattacks and evaluates potential defense mechanisms against them.

Findings

COVID-19 attacks leverage various attack stages and techniques.

Certain defense strategies show promise in mitigating these attacks.

The landscape of COVID-19 cyberattacks is diverse and evolving.

Abstract

COVID-19 (Coronavirus) hit the global society and economy with a big surprise. In particular, work-from-home has become a new norm for employees. Despite the fact that COVID-19 can equally attack innocent people and cybercriminals, it is ironic to see surges in cyberattacks leveraging COVID-19 as a theme, dubbed COVID-19 themed cyberattacks or COVID-19 attacks for short, which represent a new phenomenon that has yet to be systematically understood. In this paper, we make the first step towards fully characterizing the landscape of these attacks, including their sophistication via the Cyber Kill Chain model. We also explore the solution space of defenses against these attacks.