Coronavirus alarms are spread by spam with links to conspiracy sites

March 04, 2020

The COVID-19 epidemic caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is a major topic of news, but we can also find it in public Internet discussions. Panic and alarm messages are also spreaded by email and conspiracy sites.

At the same time, the miserable situation full of lies, half-truths and myths is exploited by crooks who reach out to the masses by spam and offer guaranteed treatment or effective tricks.

Conspiracy Sites

Big part of the alarms is spreading through conspiracy sites and links that are spreading via email. Here you can read:

• 5G is a new type of weapon and helps spread coronavirus
• after the evacuation of the US embassy in China, buried biological boxes were found
• governments are hiding something, because there is no coronavirus in Africa
• Coronavirus is a weapon aimed at Chinese soldiers

and many others

This “information” is spread mainly through spam, but also through direct email forwarding among users.

Social networks are trying to fight with such fake news, Facebook is already interfering with them, reducing their reach, or deleting them. It cooperate with the World Health Organizations and acts in accordance with the rules on intervention against contributions directly endangering human health.

If you receive a similar email, do not respond to it or forward it. In good faith, you can unnecessarily spread panic and links to unreliable sites that spread unsubstantiated speculation and lies.

Abuse of the current situation

Czech National Cyber Security Center has released alert to mimic correspondence from the World Health Organization (WHO) containing important information about the current coronavirus epidemic.

Similar spam messages then include a link to a page that is a copy of the WHO site, but contains a pop-up requesting sensitive information, including email login information. In the end, it is a common phishing, reinforced by an interest in current situation.

Several types of campaigns have been reported, another e-mail impersonating a report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and allegedly containing a list of infected people living around. The goal is the same – to visit the phishing site and steal login information.

The third recorded variant again plays the conspiratorial note and contains a secret list of measures imposed on international trade and transport. This is to be found in the attachment, which, however, contains malware.

Do not open similar alarms, real world health organizations do not inform citizens with spam directed to their mailboxes. This is always a fraud in order to harm the addressee.

Where spam spreads

In the context of the current situation, it is interesting to look at which countries spread the most spam messages. Our systems are constantly capturing a huge number of attempts to deliver spam from millions of IP addresses.

Therefore, we have very accurate statistics on which countries spammers are trying to push their fraudulent messages into our mailboxes.

Last month we detected more than 10 million infected IP addresses. Most were in China, Vietnam, India, Russia and Iran. These are top spam countries for long time. The top ten are then closed by Pakistan, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Tunisia.