New Delhi: On June 21, the government warned of a major upcoming phishing attack that promises free Covid-19 testing across India. Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued an advisory warning that the potential phishing attacks could impersonate government agencies, departments, and trade bodies. The government also said that the malicious group claimed to have 2 million individual email addresses.

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As phishing attacks become more sophisticated with time, new technologies make scammers search for new ways to steal from people. In order to keep your identity protected, you must update yourself with new information.

In basic a sense, phishing is a cybercrime in which a target is contacted by email, telephone, or text message by someone posing as a legitimate institution. They lure people to provide sensitive data such as identity, banking and credit card details, and passwords.

The information is then used to access important accounts and can result in identity theft and financial loss. According to reports, as per an Akamai report, phishing plays a role in 32% of all breaches and 78 percent of all cyber attacks.

During the early days of the lockdown, there was a sudden spike in Phishing cases. For example, WHO asking for donations, reports have come in about very authentic-looking emails asking for contributions to fight the pandemic.

An email from Vietnam even asked for donations for the WHO bitcoin wallet. WHO does not have a bitcoin wallet.

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According to CERT-In, these are someone the best practices you can follow to keep yourself from such attacks:

  • Don’t open attachments from unsolicited emails even if they come from your contact list, don’t click on links contained in your email. If you want to visit the page, go through directly through your browser.

  • Be cautious of the attachments you get via email, even if you know the sender and the attachment was expected.

  • Leverage good privacy in email communications, additionally, encrypt/protect sensitive information shared on the email.

  • Scan the attachment, and make sure the file extension matched the file type.

  • Beware of phishing domain, spelling errors in emails, websites, and unfamiliar email senders.

  • Do not submit personal information to unfamiliar websites or to unfamiliar emails.

  • Beware and do not click on URLs offering prizes, discounts or rewards, etc.

  • Use safe browsing tools, filtering tools provided by your anti-virus, firewalls, and filtering services.

  • Update your spam filters.

  • Report any unusual attack to incident@cert-in.org.in with relevant information like logs and email headers etc.


Recently, there were reports of Lazarus, a North Korea-sponsored hacking group, plotting to launch mass-scale ‘phishing’ attacks through fake emails designed as COVID-19 relief efforts.

The target of this was the US, UK, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea and India because the respective governments extended stimulus payments to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.