Fake Websites Used in COVID-19 Themed Phishing Attacks, Impersonating Brands Like Pfizer and BioNTech


In April 2020, we reported on a large influx of COVID-19 themed phishing attacks starting in February 2020. With March 2021 marking the one-year anniversary that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, we revisited the phishing trends we observed in the past year to gain deeper insight into the various COVID-related topics that attackers might try to exploit.

Starting with the set of all phishing URLs detected globally between January 2020 and February 2021, we generated sets of specific keywords (or phrases) that served as indicators for each COVID-related topic, and applied keyword matching to determine which phishing URLs were related to each topic. (To ensure that the matched URLs were indeed COVID-related, we iteratively spot-checked the resulting URLs and refined these keywords/phrases to minimize the incidence of false positives.)

We found that at each step along the way, attackers have continued to change their chosen tactics to adapt to the latest pandemic trends, in hopes that maintaining a timely sense of urgency will make it more likely for victims to give up their credentials.

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Source: Palo Alto