COVID-19 Themed Malware Within Cloud Environments


Unit 42 researchers found that public cloud infrastructure has communicated with domains known to distribute COVID-19 themed malware. On March 24, 2020, Unit 42 published a blog discussing attack patterns used by malicious actors in relation to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Taking these findings a step further, researchers attempted to uncover if there are malicious COVID-19 related events taking place within public cloud infrastructure. If indications of this activity were found, how could organizations protect themselves?

Researchers identified 300+ COVID-19 themed malware samples that communicated with 20 unique IP addresses and domain indicators of compromise (IOCs). After querying Prisma Cloud for network connections to these 20 suspicious IOCs between March 1 and April 7, 2020, researchers found a total of 453,074 unique network connections across 27 unique cloud environments

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Source: Palo Alto