Leveraging COVID-19 themes for malicious purposes. [Research Saturday]

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4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

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Summary

Guest Joe Slowik joins us from DomainTools to discuss his team's research "COVID-19 Phishing With a Side of Cobalt Strike." Multiple adversaries, from criminal groups to state-directed entities, engaged in malicious cyber activity using COVID-19 pandemic themes since March 2020. Adversaries continue to leverage the pandemic, arguably the most significant issue globally as of this writing, in various ways. Yet the most persistent avenue remains using COVID-19 themes for building malicious document files. Examples include lures associated with Cloud Atlas-linked activity and broader targeting of health authorities. Given the continued significance of the pandemic and persistent use of pandemic themes by adversaries, DomainTools researchers continuously monitor for items leveraging COVID-19 content for malicious purposes. While conducting this research, DomainTools analysts identified an interesting malicious document with what appeared to be unique staging and execution mechanisms. Research can be found here: COVID-19 Phishing With a Side of Cobalt Strike Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	You're listening to the CyberWire Network, powered by N2K.
0:07.0	Today's episode is sponsored by SRM, your first call for cybersecurity and
0:18.2	investigations. Threats today are evolving faster than ever before and since 2005 SRM has pioneered
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0:36.5	or navigating the murky waters of compliance and ESG challenges,
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1:01.5	unique cyber challenges.
1:03.0	Search your first call to discover how SRM can help your business. Hello everyone and welcome to the CyberWires Research Saturday.
1:26.0	I'm Dave Bitner and this is our weekly conversation with researchers and analysts tracking
1:31.2	down threats and vulnerabilities, solving some of the hard problems of protecting ourselves in a rapidly evolving cyberspace.
1:39.0	Thanks for joining us. Just in the course of everyday keeping an eye on the security landscape looking for things that just seem interesting and
1:55.5	related to items of interest and you know the main item of interest for everyone
2:00.6	right now is still and remains the ongoing pandemic.
2:05.0	That's Joe Sloick. He's a senior security researcher at domain tools.
2:10.0	The research we're discussing today is titled COVID-19 fishing with a side of COBOLT strike.
2:24.0	You can sense to glory. If this is started something.
2:26.0	Feel it in your bones.
2:28.0	The quarterfinals.
	...

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