As the number of positive Coronavirus cases has increased in Buncombe County, North Carolina, the news is now out that the Public Health Emergency Preparedness team is struggling hard to deal with malicious emails, phishing attempts and ransomware attacks on its infrastructure.
Coordinator of the healthcare Fletcher Tove confirmed the incident and said that the IT infrastructure was witnessing an increase in cyber attacks from the past one week in parallel to the rise in a number of cases of Covid 19.
“The bad guys are picking up targets in the name of charities, the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control and are seen asking for critical data such as social security numbers, and credit card information”, said Tove, in a special media update on Friday.
Tove added that the incident came into light just a couple of days after the Cleveland County’s Shelby city offices reported about a ransomware incident hitting their database.
“As the world is going through a health crisis, hackers are seen leveraging the situation to make money by targeting vulnerable points”, said Maria Thompson, the State Chief Risk Officer. She added that cybercriminals are taking advantage of the situation and might hit those who are working from home.
From the past few days, most of the public, as well as private companies, have advised their employees to Telework from their homes wherever n whenever possible. And this might make hackers snatch every opportunity to exploit the endpoints to infiltrate networks added to Ms.Thompson.
Maria is advising companies to back up data and at the same time learn about the threat possibilities lurking in the cyber landscape. Also, she is advising network admins to keep a vigil on the workloads to isolate the digital infrastructure from cyber attacks.
