Russia-Ukraine war brings more phishing, malware scams
A continuously growing number of cyber criminals are using the Russia-Ukraine war to lure in unsuspecting victims in their phishing and malware campaigns.
According to Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), government-backed hackers from China, Iran, North Korea and Russia — as well as unattributed groups — are using various Ukraine war-related themes to led targets in malicious e-mails and inks.
TAG said that “financially-motivated and criminal actors are also using current events as a means for targeting users. For example, one actor is impersonating military personnel to extort money for rescuing relatives in Ukraine.”
Additionally, multiple ransomware brokers are continuing their operations in a ‘business as usual’ sense despite the conflict.
Since the tensions between Russia and Ukraine started, there has been a marked increase in cyber warfare activity between the countries and other parts of Eastern Europe.
A report by cyber security firm ESET disclosed that a previously discovered new destructive malware was circulating in Ukraine, as Russia invaded its neighboring country.
ESET’s telemetry data showed the malware was installed on hundreds of machines in the country. This followed some distributed denial-of-service attacks against several Ukrainian websites earlier.
