While the world is fighting the COVID-19 pandemic also known as Coronavirus, we have seen reports of a massive jump in the cases of cybercrime and hacking. Also, the fact is that hackers have found it easy to hack into people’s accounts because they are either working from home or at home meaning that their security is nowhere near as tight as when they are in their offices. Talking about the cases of hacking, we now have multiple reports of WHO or World Health Organization staff getting hacked or at least hacking attempts on them.
First of all, it was the Chinese hackers who reportedly attacked the WHO and tried to hack into its system. Now, we believe that this might have been a state-sponsored attack in order to gain data of WHO’s numbers for the COVID-19 pandemic around the world or even try to destroy the figures in order to not let the real figures go out.
Now, one of the countries outside of South East Asia that has been badly affected by this virus is also linked with the attacks of hacking on WHO. It is reported that Iranian hackers also tried to attack the WHO staff emails during the pandemic situation. It is also believed that Iranian hackers might have done so to intercept the emails from WHO staff and gain information about the internal staff chat.
Having said that, the report mentions that no evidence of accounts being compromised has been found but it is certain that hacking attempts were made and the organization came under a “sustained digital bombardment by hackers seeking information about the outbreak”.
One source from Reuters even said that “We’ve seen some targeting by what looks like Iranian government-backed attackers targeting international health organizations generally via phishing,”. WHO spokesperson says that “To the best of our knowledge, none of these hacking attempts were successful,”
