CYBER SPIKE

A top official at the FBI on Wednesday said that the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has received 20,000 coronavirus-related cyber threat reports this year, as officials sounded the alarm on growing cyber threats to COVID-19 vaccine research.

Tonya Ugoretz, the deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said during a virtual conference hosted by cybersecurity group CrowdStrike that the IC3 was tracking a massive spike in hackers using the COVID-19 crisis to target Americans.

“Already, here we are in the first or second week of June, the IC3 has already had as many complaints up to this point as they did for all of 2019, and that is for all types of internet fraud,” Ugoretz said.

She noted that for just coronavirus-related activity — such as scams, malicious emails, or fraud — the FBI IC3 has received “at least 20,000 complaints.”

The new data revealed Wednesday is a continuation of a trend in increasing cyberattacks and targeting during both the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing protests around the death of George Floyd. Major agencies including the World Health Organization and the Department of Health and Human Services have been targeted, while coronavirus-related scams have targeted federal relief funds.

Ugoretz said in April that the IC3 was receiving between 3,000 and 4,000 cybersecurity complaints per day, an increase from the typical 1,000 complaints per day the IC3 saw prior to the pandemic.