Easy money pandemic: Welfare as bait

The coronavirus pandemic has dealt a major blow to the global economy. Restrictive measures have forced many companies to suspend operations, and workers to take time off at their own expense. Attempting www.mcafee/activate to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, governments worldwide are taking steps to support businesses and citizens through tax breaks, compensation schemes, stimulus checks, and the like.

In other words, money almost literally falling from the sky doesn’t necessarily sound like fantasy this year. However mcafee.com/activate product key, if you receive an e-mail stating that you can claim a tidy sum as some sort of pandemic-related relief, don’t www.mcafee.com/activate rush to celebrate www.mcafee.com/activate download. Governments are not the only www.mcafee.com/activate product key ones promising financial aid. So too are fraudsters, but as you can guess, their promises lead to the opposite. Here are some examples of “support” that you definitely don’t want.

Free malware for everyone

A lot of spam these days uses pandemic-related payouts as bait to distribute malware. You might be asked to open an attachment or click on a www.mcafee/activate link in the message to get at the promised funds.

For example, scammers targeting users mcafee.com/activate product key in Brazil claim that the government has abolished electricity payments because www.mcafee.com/activate of the pandemic. You can’t simply stop paying, though; first, you must register online using the link conveniently provided in the message.

Although the link seems to point to a government website, the e-mail sender’s address looks anything but official. If the recipient  www.mcafee.com/activate download fails to smell the rat and clicks through, then Trojan loader Sneaky (our products identify it as Trojan-Downloader.OLE2.Sneaky.gen) is installed on the computer, and it then downloads and runs another Trojan.

In another e-mail, cybercriminals preying on users in South Africa promise to pay compensation all summer — provided they fill out the attached form. The “form” turns out to be the SelfDel backdoor(Trojan.Win32.SelfDel.hoxq), which gives www.mcafee/activate the attackers remote control over the victim’s computer.

Scammers are also adept at imitating banks. Clients of one financial institution, for example, are prompted not only to open an attached archive www.mcafee.com/activate product key supposedly with confirmation of the payout, but to log in to their account to check the transaction details. The real reason is so that the mcafee.com/activate product key Noon Trojan (Trojan-Spy.MSIL.Noon.gen), concealed in the archive, can steal the username and password when the user rushes to log in to their bank account.

Good old phishing

Passwords and other data are sometimes easy to coax out of users without the help of malware. For example, we were struck by a “government” e-mail offering compensation to those aged 70 and up. This social group www.mcafee.com/activate tends to be more www.mcafee/activate susceptible to fraud than young people because many aren’t as well-versed in modern technology.

In addition, COVID-19 poses a greater health risk to older people, which is why in many countries they actually receive more subsidies www.mcafee.com/activate download than other age groups mcafee.com/activate product key. The regrettable result is an almost perfect target. In this scam, the addressee is asked to fill out a form by clicking a link.

If the user is interested enough to click the link www.mcafee.com/activate product key, they do indeed see a form asking for their first and last names, as well as social security number (SSN) and current address. Curiously, the form is seemingly aimed at US residents (other countries don’t use SSNs), but the Submit button

Clicking the button forwards the information entered in the form www.mcafee/activate to the scammers, who get an up-to-date database of elderly people with real addresses and SSNs.

After submitting the form, the user is taken to the official page of the genuine, WHO-backed COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund mcafee.com/activate product key, and invited to make a donation. This is an attempt by the attackers to add credibility to their scheme www.mcafee.com/activate, as well as distract www.mcafee.com/activate download the victim from the original message. After all, no compensation from the government will be arriving

Seeking corporate mailboxes

Scammers on thehaut for coporate mail box didn’t ignore the topic of anti-crisis measures, either. E-mails aimed at Spanish companies mention new tax breaks www.mcafee/activate for businesses. Naturally www.mcafee.com/activate download, to find out if they can make www.mcafee.com/activate product key a claim, recipients need to open a file by clicking a link mcafee.com/activate product key — and not just read the document, but sign and return it. The victim is given one week to act.