The Coronavirus-themed attacks continue to increase, experts warn of thousands of COVID-19 scam and malware sites are being created every day.

Crooks and nation-state actors continue to exploit the interest of potential victims in the Coronavirus outbreak.

In recent weeks, we observed that threat actors are creating thousands of coronavirus-themed websites on a daily basis.

The sites are employed in a broad range of attacks, including phishing attacks, frauds, and malware-based attacks.

Since February, we are observing thousands of new Coronavirus-related domains containing keywords like C oronavirus, COVID19, COVID, pandemic, vaccine, virus.

The security researcher who goes online by the name of DustyFresh is one of the experts that monitored the alarmin trend.

I started seeing a lot of scams and malware related to COVID-19, so I created a feed that is updated every 30 seconds if a new COVID-19 related hostname is discovered in certificate transparency logs.https://t.co/2rGqGbwxQt pic.twitter.com/Tg7v1kXD5Y — dustyfresh (@dustyfresh) March 14, 2020

The experts published a list containing thousands of COVID19-related domains created between March 14 and March 18, most of them potentially malicious.

The list only analyzed sites containing the word “ coronavirus ,” clearly extending the search for other terms (i.e. COVID19, vaccine, etc.) and to a longer period , we can find tens of thousands similar websites.

A similar research was conducted by researchers from security firm RiskIQ that shared several lists of COVID19-related malicious domains.

Attacks using #COVID19 are reprehensible. Unfortunately, they're now rampant. To enable the research community, we're providing lists of newly observed infrastructure matching coronavirus themes. Apply code COVID19 in @PassiveTotal for 30 days of access:https://t.co/8etb2YS4VG pic.twitter.com/F9kq8sbqyQ — RiskIQ (@RiskIQ) March 16, 2020

Data reported by RiskIQ are disconcerting, the experts observed more than 13,500 suspicious domains on March 15 and more than 35,000 domains on March 16.

ZDNet proposes a dashboard, which aggregates RiskIQ’s feed and lists domains in real-time, as they’re being discovered.

Security experts from Trend Micro also published an interesting analysis of Coronavirus-themed attacks, they observed a notable increase in domain names using the word “corona.”

259 .COM domain names with the keyword “corona" have been newly registered or updated in the last 24-48 hours. pic.twitter.com/ZNsaUIB5xP — Jeremiah Grossman (@jeremiahg) March 2, 2020

Pierluigi Paganini