Here's how scammers are using the coronavirus to cash in

While you're cooped up, scammers are cashing in on Corona virus, fear and anxiety. Here are the top online scams you need to be on the lookout for right now. There are thousands of different schemes running right now exploiting our fear and urgent anxiety. About the corona virus health crisis running right now across the web. The email that fooled me was good. It was really good. It was well designed. It kind of felt right. So I wanted to learn more about the scammers, the cybercriminals Who designed phishing attacks like this? I reached out to Aaron higby He is the Chief Technology Officer at a firm called pro fence. They do cyber defense and especially phishing defense all day every day. I asked Aaron why emails like this are so effective. Death With respect to phishing, every attacker out there is going to use some sort of emotional trigger to try to get you to click on a link or a dangerous attachment. And so you can mentally get in tune with what these triggers are fear, reward, curiosity, urgency. Those are telltale signs that this female might be something dangerous that you're interacting with. Okay, yeah, phishing is dangerous but it's also on the clear net. It's on your phone in your pocket. In your email, your text messages. What about the dark web? We asked our expert charity right to track down a few examples currently for sale. On dark web markets, she's a security analyst at insights. Also a former NSA cyber expert. At insights we've been doing a lot of research and deep and dark web, which is really our bread and butter. And we spend a lot of time undercover in underground forums, watching what hackers are talking about, watching what criminals are. Saying and what we're discovering right now is just this influx of crime related to scams and hoaxes around Coronavirus. So, like you mentioned a Corona virus detector, which is really just the scanner that they're using to take temperatures at airports. But some threat actors are selling these for upwards of 400 to $600 in Bitcoin. We're also seeing rapid test kits being sold, which makes me question where they're getting them and if they're legitimate at all. Also what else we've seen vaccines people are saying that they have vaccines. Thought are legitimate and that can ship out immediately. If you think about what might be in that vial that they call a vaccine, you might be putting foreign chemicals into your body, or even introducing the virus to your body. So we didn't just find phony Corona virus cures. We also found that scammers Cybercriminals, whatever you want to call them, they're also selling Coronavirus extortion. Some of these ransomware letters are really scary. One of them says, if you don't pay this ransom to decrypt all your files, I can infect your whole family with the Coronavirus Even though it's probably not true, this kind of fear mongering is very effective. If you recently started remote work at home, you need to make sure that you have Endpoint Protection enabled on your device. That means antivirus. You also need to make sure that you're using some kind of remote security tool like a VPN. There are a lot of great VPNs out there at a very low cost and some for even free, something is better than nothing. I also would recommend that if you get an email that you didn't expect to get, double check the sender and ask somebody. If somebody from work sends you an email or a family member forwards you a link. Just say what is this. Did you mean to send this to me. And instead of clicking on a link to go to a website that looks legitimate, like World Health Organization website, instead go to your browser and actually go directly to that website instead of clicking on a link.