According to the National Cyber Security Centre in the U.K., criminals launched more websites in 2020 to trick people into giving them information, downloading malware, and sending them money. They used the pandemic lockdown to their advantage by pretending to be famous people, shops, and government agencies. They also made these websites to trick people into giving them information.
The National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) shut down 700,595 malicious campaigns in 2018, which is 15 times more than the previous year. This is because the number of scams increased, and the service started focusing on new types of activity. The agency shared this information in a report that came out on Monday. The agency also said that attacks were happening for longer on average.
The advantages they took
Hackers and phishers took advantage of the fact that more people were working from home, which made corporate security less tight, and some were afraid of the virus, making them more likely to click on links that said they had information about the disease. This led to a rise in the number of hacking and phishing attacks worldwide, which was caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
During lockdowns, it was common for people to commit fraud against others by pretending to be the government of the United Kingdom. Websites would pose as tax or health authorities to take advantage of people looking for information during significant changes like Brexit and emergency coronavirus measures. According to the research, almost one-third of the websites in this category were hosted by the American domain registrar NameCheap.
The reports said
The NCSC said that by the middle of the year, the average time taking down the organization’s campaigns was usually more than 60 hours. Because of this, NameCheap became an excellent place to host phishing, which may help to explain why the number of monthly hosted campaigns has increased since then. About 46.4% of the scams that used fake celebrity endorsements from people like billionaire Richard Branson came from servers owned by Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc., a significant player in the hosting industry. The British cyber security agency asked for them to be taken down, and they were taken down in a median of 19 hours. This makes Amazon one of the companies responding the fastest to this fraud.
A spokesperson for Amazon did not respond quickly to a comment request made outside of regular business hours. A NameCheap representative didn’t have anything to say about the situation right away. The latest ACD report shows how the NCSC used its Takedown Service to protect the public from cons like fake ads for vaccinations and fake celebrity endorsements.
The research showed that the NCSC took down over 700,000 online scams last year, with a total of 1.4 million URLs. This is a big jump compared to how many were deleted in previous years.
The focus
ACD’s main focus over the past year was ensuring the NHS was safe, and the report went into detail about what was done to keep an eye out for attacks that were meant to steal credentials from the NHS and possibly damage essential computer systems. In 2020, ACD found 122 phishing attacks that used NHS branding, more than in 2019. Only 36 of these kinds of efforts were found in 2019.
Some of the others were fake or unofficial versions of the NHS Test and Trace mobile app. As a result of our investigation, 43 instances of NHS apps that could be downloaded from places other than the official Apple and Google app stores have been taken down. The National Health Service (NHS) and other parts of society, like the T.V. Licensing system, have also been protected. On the other hand, this system has been hit by several cyberattacks at the same time that news came out that U.K. pensioners’ T.V. Licensing rights would change in July 2020.
