(Wired) Sonner Kehrt - In February, Israel-based cyber intelligence researcher Ohad Zaidenberg started noticing malicious emails and files disguised as information about Covid. They used fear of the new virus as leverage to get people to click a link or download a file. A former intelligence officer, Zaidenberg became conceerned that the malware might compromise hospital security. In May 2017, computers at National Health Service hospitals all across the UK started displaying a pop-up message demanding users pay $300 in bitcoin to restore access to their files. The ransomware attack infected more than 200,000 computers worldwide and the attack cost the National Health Service over $100 million. Then Zaidenberg saw in the news that the second-largest hospital in the Czech Republic had been attacked. Zaidenberg recruited a group of cyber threat researchers to work, pro bono, assessing threats related to the virus. Within a month, the group had well over a thousand members, each vetted for their identities and the skills they could contribute. Members organized themselves into teams and fanned out to hunt down Covid-related threats before they could wreak havoc. Within the first month, they'd found more than 2,000 health care software vulnerabilities in 80 countries and identified nearly 400 malicious files that were unlikely to be stopped by common antivirus software.
2020-10-01 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive