Threat actors have leveraged the fear and uncertainty created by the global pandemic to ramp up their social engineering and malware attacks – both of which can be hugely detrimental for organisations . Sherrod DeGrippo , Senior Director , Threat Research and Detection , Proofpoint , highlights the malware trends organisations need to be aware of and offers some key advice to CISOs building their incident response plans .

The impact of COVID-19 on the threat landscape

“ As we saw the situation develop over the past several months , beginning at the early part of 2020 , as things started to move west , we were definitely questioning how this current event would impact the threat landscape and we saw the first use of COVID-19 in social engineering attacks in late January . Those were against targets in the West , so it was absolutely something that was on the mind of the threat actors and started quite early as that news came in ,” DeGrippo explained .

As the situation has developed , threat researchers have identified much more specific and tailored techniques .

“ Instead of just talking about the virus , we see social engineering talking about the vaccine , or saying ‘ click here to see a list of people who have been infected in your area ’. We see it used as a way to push for urgency .”

Where the threats are coming from and the motivation behind them

DeGrippo highlights that ‘ just about every ’ actor on the landscape has leveraged the pandemic in some way – from the typical commodity , crimeware actors to state sponsored and smaller actors behind the likes of BEC and email fraud .

“ When it comes to motivation for attacks like these , typically they ’ re financially motivated . Of course , the state sponsored actors are motivated by espionage and nation state type interests , but for the most part , the motivations that these actors have hasn ’ t really changed , the social engineering wars that they ’ re leveraging is what has become the new thing ,” she said .

Vertical and regional targets

While such attacks originally started with a focus on targets in the West , these have now become so widespread they are no longer considered ‘ unusual ’. DeGrippo said : “ At this point , anyone , anywhere , is subject to potentially getting a COVID-19 social engineering attack . We see these day in and day out now , in all kinds of different ways . So , it ’ s really become the standard .”

Malware trends of which organisations should be aware

“ Malware is something that ’ s always evolving – that ’ s one of the things that we can count on . It ’ s never the same dayto-day , week-to-week ,” DeGrippo said , highlighting that the last year had seen the emergence of two similar types of malware that work together .

“ The first is the age of the modular downloader . These downloader malware samples essentially get on a machine and then they download second , third and later stage payloads , meaning that the threat actor can make a decision about what is actually put on that machine in the end .

“ Something you ’ ve all been hearing a lot about is , of course , ransomware . What we ’ ve noticed is that these operator control downloaders are typically the delivery vehicle for ransomware when the threat actor makes the decision that ransomware is the right choice .”

Most detrimental types of malware for enterprises

“ It really depends on what your operations look like day-to-day – a banking trojan which steals money out of a bank account may be really devastating for some businesses if they operate on a really tight cash flow , whereas if there is ransomware on a few machines they might be able to turn those around quickly ,” DeGrippo said . However , ransomware in large-scale deployment has been ‘ absolutely devastating ’ for organisations . Historically , ransomware would be on one machine and , while inconvenient , could generally be taken care of the by the IT team .

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