Combating corruption in the times of Corona

Cyber criminals are out in the dark to help hackers with discounted hacking tools.

Prices and perils have a deep correlation with each other.

While certain prices go up creating an artificial shortage of sorts completing a vicious circle, some prices go down too for more disastrous consequences.

Just like the case of masks, hand sanitizers and hacking tools respectively.

As discovered by Checkpoint a group of cyber criminals are selling malicious hacking tools at a reduced price, predominantly on the dark web to allure bad actors to buy and target systems in these vulnerable times, clinically as well as digitally.

The hacking virus being thus sold is discount coded ‘Covid-19' or ‘Coronavirus' ironically.

Intended at hoodwinking innocent netizens, these tools are being advertised fiercely across internet chatrooms for those who are under house arrest and have disposable free time to hatch and hack.

Let us focus on a few practical examples.

NativeOne Products, a notorious seller is offering tools that can be used to consume and corrupt email services like Gmail and Outlook along with Google Chrome. It is a tool to "bypass WinDefender" and a file host for 1 month for any type of file irrespective of it being infected or not.

The prices of these malicious tools differ as per their availability as they are being offered in limited editions.

On the other hand there are sellers who are offering hacking services themselves.

An example of the above is a group called SSHacker which is offering to hack Facebook accounts for $300 but with a 15% discount as shown under!!!

Certain sites also have physical products on sale, like the on line market on dark web only accessible by TOR selling a MAC Book!!!

The dark web is however not the only place hosting the trade.

As par statistics 16000 domains related to coronavirus have been registered from the beginning of 2020.Even though a majority of these websites are legitimate, some of them are fraudulent websites engineered toinflict hacking attacks on users like phishing etc.

The graph above shows the line of generic searches for coronavirus by Google Trends as compared against the social media discussions trends on cyber security and cyber-crime in relation to the virus.

An example of this false selling is the fake antivirus. Initiated to take advantage of theill-informedand uninitiated the sellers are cajoling the buyers on the internet to invest in a simple code to save them from virus attacks.

The bottom line is to be aware of the internet on goings and attend only the valid offers that deliver what they promise while avoiding the pretentious predators.A user may end up destroying one's internet infrastructure or losing his life's savings. So clicking on stray links should be avoided at all costswith online attention being paid only to those websites which have a credential good enough to be trusted.

ISOEH is the organization which teaches the right trend to combat cyber security threats.

Read on to know more about Corona and cyber security.