Paper Info
Title
Scam Pandemic: How Attackers Exploit Public Fear through Phishing
Abstract
As the COVID-19 pandemic started triggering widespread lockdowns across the globe, cybercriminals did not hesitate to take advantage of users' increased usage of the Internet and their reliance on it. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive measurement study of online social engineering attacks in the early months of the pandemic. By collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing DNS records, TLS certificates, phishing URLs, phishing website source code, phishing emails, web traffic to phishing websites, news articles, and government announcements, we track trends of phishing activity between January and May 2020 and seek to understand the key implications of the underlying trends.We find that phishing attack traffic in March and April 2020 skyrocketed up to 220% of its pre-COVID-19 rate, far exceeding typical seasonal spikes. Attackers exploited victims' uncertainty and fear related to the pandemic through a variety of highly targeted scams, including emerging scam types against which current defenses are not sufficient as well as traditional phishing which outpaced the ecosystem's collective response.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/eCrime51433.2020.9493260
2020 APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime)
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
Website source code,pre-COVID-19 rate,phishing attack traffic,phishing activity,news articles,phishing Websites,Web traffic,DNS records,online social engineering attacks,comprehensive measurement study,cybercriminals,COVID-19 pandemic,scam pandemic
Conference
2159-1237
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-6654-3084-5
2
0.39
References 
Authors
0
12
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marzieh Bitaab120.73
haehyun cho2166.55
Adam Oest320.39
Penghui Zhang421.06
Zhibo Sun530.77
Rana Pourmohamad620.39
Doowon Kim7929.72
Tiffany Bao8648.17
Ruoyu Wang931.07
Yan Shoshitaishvili1035826.98
Adam Doupé1135733.14
Gail-Joon Ahn123012203.39