Given the community interest and media coverage surrounding the economic stimulus bill currently being considered by the United States House of Representatives, we anticipate attackers will increasingly leverage lures tailored to the new stimulus bill and related recovery efforts such as stimulus checks, unemployment compensation and small business loans. Although campaigns employing themes relevant to these matters are only beginning to be adopted by threat actors, we expect future campaigns—primarily those perpetrated by financially motivated threat actors—to incorporate these themes in proportion to the media’s coverage of these topics.
Threat actors with varying motivations are actively exploiting the current pandemic and public fear of the coronavirus and COVID-19. This is consistent with our expectations; malicious actors are typically quick to adapt their social engineering lures to exploit major flashpoints along with other recurrent events (e.g. holidays, Olympics). Security researchers at FireEye and in the broader community have already begun to identify and report on COVID-19 themed campaigns with grant, payment, or economic recovered themed emails and attachments.
