More from Author Ben Oakley here: https://globelivemedia.com/author/ben-oakley/

They warn about the offer of Fake Vaccines on the Dark Web

Since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been an increase in cyber scams that sought to take advantage of this situation to steal information and access data to different users’ accounts. In this context, cases of phishing or identity theft had a sustained growth, but they were not the only devices on which criminals have relied.

In recent times, there has been an increase in Cyberattack campaigns to scam users by offering vaccines. In fact, since December, a 400% growth has been detected in the offers of the Covid-19 vaccine on the dark web.

A portion of the deep web is known as the dark web. But they are not synonymous. Within the deep web there are files, pages protected by passwords, form pages, non-HTML content, etc. And in turn, there is a subgroup known as the dark web that have masked IP addresses so as not to appear in conventional search engines.

The dark web exists in darknets, which are networks that overlap the public web and which can be accessed through specific programs such as Freenet, ZeroNet or TOR, which is the most popular.

Specialists from the security company Check Point explain that cybercriminals are taking advantage of the vaccination campaign for their own benefit, since while last month the average price of the vaccine was 250 dollars, it now stands between 500 and 1000 dollars in bitcoins.

Cybercriminals Take Advantage of the Pandemic to Scam Users

Cybercriminals Take Advantage of the Pandemic to Scam Users 

From Check Point they point out that given the incipient number of registered domains related to the vaccine (only in the first days of November, more than 1,000 were counted, the same number as in the previous three months), both the FBI and Europol have warned about this type of scam.

Likewise, the black market for the sale of vaccines against the coronavirus has grown in recent weeks. In fact, from the company they detail that they have discovered advertisements that do not sell individual doses, but large quantities of vaccines, with the aim of deceiving users who have greater purchasing power and want to acquire the units for their family and friends.

The general concern about the increase in cases of contagion and the fear of the arrival of a third wave with a higher rate of virality has driven this type of scams on the dark web, where vaccine offers have grown 400 percent since December.

On the other hand, another factor that marks the growth of the black market resides in the variety of vaccines available. The fact that more and more companies are developing them, together with the fact that they receive approvals from the competent medical bodies, means that there is a greater range of options from which to choose.

In this regard, the company’s researchers point out that, before the approved vaccines began to be distributed worldwide, they detected advertisements offering vaccines “made in China”, which were not branded and were not approved by the Food Administration and US Drugs (FDA).

However, since FDA approved brands are distributed worldwide, most of the deals on the dark web advertise the sale of these as named brands, or simply not specifying the brand of the vaccine.

Categorized in:

Tagged in: