bengaluru from trojan attacks to phishing cybercriminals are making the most of the coronavirus outbreak using it to spread their own viruses online with hundreds of websites using the novel virus domain having popped in just the two weeks between january 30 and february 10 this yearthe most latest global threat index published by check point software technologies a cyber threat intelligence provider headquartered in israel shows that cybercriminals are exploiting interest in the global epidemic to spread malicious activity with several spam campaigns relating to the outbreak of the virus while the world attempts to take control over the spread of the coronavirus and tries to contain eliminate and prevent it from spreading hackers around the globe have found the virus serving them well as an enabler for their activitiesviruses can be transmitted in various forms through saliva touch or even through air and malware is similar in the sense that it finds different vectors to penetrate and right after the huge global attention around the coronavirus cybercriminals started using the interest to spread malicious activity further in addition to email campaigns since the coronavirus outbreak check point has also observed a noticeable number of new websites registered with domain names related to the virus according to the report there have been at least 1000 such sites reported in the the said two weeksomer dembinsky data research team leader threat intelligence and research area check point told toi over phone from israel it was found that from about a 100 domains a week the number of websites jumped to 1000 in one week now many of these could also be legitimate websites created by governments for the benefit of people but we also found that in just one week there were over 1600 web pages that had malicious contentmany of these domains will probably be used for phishing attempts as for now we have already spotted and protect online users from many websites known to be related to malicious activities that lure the victims to their websites with discussions around the virus as well as from scam websites that claim to sell face masks vaccines and home tests that can detect the virus check point saidone example of such a website is vaccinecovid19com which was first created on february 11 and registered in russia the website is insecure and offers to sell the best and fastest test for coronavirus detection at the fantastic price of 19000 russian rubles about 300further the report said in january and february 2020 the most prominent coronavirusthemed campaign targeted japan distributing emotet in malicious email attachments pretending to be sent by a japanese disability welfare service provider the emails appeared to be reporting where the infection is spreading in several japanese cities encouraging victims to open the document for more information when the document was opened emotet was downloaded onto the victims computeremotet is an advanced selfpropagating and modular trojan it was originally a banking trojan but recently has been used as