Coronavirus: WHO sees rise in cyberattack attempts by hackers, official says
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Coronavirus: WHO sees rise in cyberattack
attempts by hackers, official says
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Elite hackers tried to interrupt into the planet Health Organization earlier this month, sources told Reuters, a part of what a senior agency official said was a quite two-fold increase in cyberattacks amid the spread of a replacement coronavirus.
WHO Chief Information Security Officer Flavio Aggio said the identity of the hackers was unclear and therefore the effort was unsuccessful.
But he warned that hacking attempts against the agency and its partners have soared as they battle to contain the coronavirus, which has killed quite 15,000 worldwide.
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The attempted break-in at the WHO was first flagged to Reuters by Alexander Urbelis, a cybersecurity expert and attorney with the New York-based Blackstone Law Group, which tracks suspicious internet domain registration activity.
Urbelis said he picked abreast of the activity around March 13, when a gaggle of hackers he’d been following activated a malicious site mimicking the WHO’s internal email system.
“I realized quite quickly that this was a live attack on the planet Health Organization within the midst of an epidemic ,” he said.
Urbelis said he didn’t know who was responsible, but two other sources briefed on the matter said they suspected a complicated group of hackers referred to as DarkHotel, which has been conducting cyber-espionage operations since a minimum of 2007.
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Messages sent to email addresses maintained by the hackers went unreturned.
When asked by Reuters about the incident, the WHO’s Aggio confirmed that the location spotted by Urbelis had been utilized in an effort to steal passwords from multiple agency staffers.
There has been an enormous increase in targeting of the WHO and other cybersecurity incidents,” Aggio said during a interview . “There are not any hard numbers, but such compromise attempts against us and therefore the use of (WHO) impersonations to focus on others have quite doubled.”
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The WHO published an alert last month – available here https://www.who.int/about/communications/cyber-security – warning that hackers are posing because the agency to steal money and sensitive information from the general public .
And officialdom within the us , Britain et al. have issued cybersecurity warnings about the risks of a newly remote workforce as people disperse to their homes to figure and study due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The motives within the case identified by Reuters aren’t clear. United Nations agencies, the WHO among them, are regularly targeted by digital espionage campaigns and Aggio said he didn't know who precisely at the organization the hackers had in their sights.
Cybersecurity firms including Romania’s Bitdefender and Moscow-based Kaspersky said they have traced many of DarkHotel’s operations to East Asia – an area that has been particularly affected by the coronavirus.
Specific targets have included government employees and business executives in places such as China, North Korea, Japan, and the United States.
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Costin Raiu, head of worldwide research and analysis at Kaspersky, couldn't confirm that DarkHotel was liable for the WHO attack but said an equivalent malicious web infrastructure had also been wont to target other healthcare and humanitarian organizations in recent weeks.
“At times like this, any information about cures or tests or vaccines concerning coronavirus would be priceless and therefore the priority of any intelligence organization of an affected country,” he said.
Officials and cybersecurity experts have warned that hackers of all stripes are seeking to maximize international concern over the spread of the coronavirus.
Urbelis said he has tracked thousands of coronavirus-themed internet sites being found out daily, many of them obviously malicious.
Source: Agencies
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