Detecting Covid-19 chaos driven phishing/malicious URL attacks by a fuzzy logic and data mining based intelligence system

Abstract

With confusion and uncertainty ruling the world, 2020 created near-perfect conditions for cybercriminals. As businesses virtually eliminated in-person experiences, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we live and caused a mass migration to digital platforms. However, this shift also made people more vulnerable to cyber-crime. Victims are being targeted by attackers for their credentials or financial rewards, or both. This is because the Internet itself is inherently difficult to secure, and the attackers can code in a way that exploits its flaws. Once the attackers gain root access to the devices, they have complete control and can do whatever they want. Consequently, taking advantage of highly unprecedented circumstances created by the Covid-19 event, cybercriminals launched massive phishing, malware, identity theft, and ransomware attacks. Therefore, if we wish to save people from these frauds in times when millions have already been tipped into poverty and the rest are trying hard to sustain, it is imperative to curb these attacks and attackers. This paper analyses the impact of Covid-19 on various cyber-security related aspects and sketches out the timeline of Covid-19 themed cyber-attacks launched globally to identify the modus operandi of the attackers and the impact of attacks. It also offers a thoroughly researched set of mitigation strategies which can be employed to prevent the attacks in the first place. Moreover, this manuscript proposes a fuzzy logic and data mining-based intelligence system for detecting Covid-19 themed malicious URL/phishing attacks. The performance of the system has been evaluated against various malicious/phishing URLs, and it was observed that the proposed system is a viable solution to this problem.

Keywords

• Covid-19
• Phishing
• Business Email Compromise (BEC)
• Ransomware
• Fuzzy-Logic
• Data mining