{"id":23977,"date":"2020-04-22T16:21:13","date_gmt":"2020-04-22T23:21:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=23977"},"modified":"2020-04-22T16:21:13","modified_gmt":"2020-04-22T23:21:13","slug":"a-warning-from-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=23977","title":{"rendered":"A WARNING FROM GOOGLE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google reported Wednesday that it had tracked at least a dozen foreign government-backed groups attempting to use information around the COVID-19 pandemic to target cyberattacks at the healthcare sector and the public.<\/p>\n

Shane Huntley, a member of Google\u2019s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), wrote in a\u00a0blog post<\/a>\u00a0that his team had seen these threat groups \u201cusing COVID-19 themes as lure for phishing and malware attempts\u2014trying to get their targets to click malicious links and download files.\u201d<\/p>\n

A major target of these attempted attacks are international and national healthcare organizations, along with their staffers, with the threat groups in some cases sending emails with fake links to the login page of the World Health Organization (WHO). Google traced some of this activity to a cybercrime group known as \u201cPackrat,\u201d which is based out of South America.<\/p>\n

Health sector not the only target:\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>Huntley wrote that while Google was adding additional security protections to higher-risk accounts as a result of its findings, it was clear that \u201chealth organizations, public health agencies, and the individuals who work there are becoming new targets as a result of COVID-19.\u201d<\/p>\n

But healthcare groups were not the only target, as hacker groups attempt to benefit from the COVID-19 crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur security systems have detected examples ranging from fake solicitations for charities and NGOs, to messages that try to mimic employer communications to employees working from home, to websites posing as official government pages and public health agencies,\u201d Huntley warned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google reported Wednesday that it had...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-science-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23977"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23978,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23977\/revisions\/23978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}