Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of cyberattacks targeting the private sector, healthcare systems, and others, raising key cybersecurity considerations about how to disrupt cyber threats.

The pandemic has forced businesses to operate remotely and spread resources while reducing budgets in an attempt to save costs during the crisis. But such moves have opened new doors for threat actors to exploit vulnerabilities as the usual security processes have been bypassed, making it more challenging for authorities to address and prevent cyber threats.

As threat actors around the world seek to gain financial and strategic advantages during the crisis, businesses require robust security to safeguard their data and clientele as phishing attacks, ransomware, and vicious malware, which posed significant issues even before the spread of Covid-19 continue to compromise security.

Tens of millions of phishing emails with enticing subject lines related to coronavirus guidelines and warnings, claiming to be from global health authorities have scammed countless individuals by tricking them into providing personal credentials,payment details, or to open malicious attachments.

With new attacks and scams which take advantage of the fear and uncertainty surrounding the pandemic surface on a daily basis, Cobwebs’s automated tools can identify the digital footprints of the threat actors behind the attacks targeting individuals and can trace them, map them and monitor them in a non-intrusive way, allowing investigators to get to the source.

Investigation can be launched with any small piece of cyber forensic information of a suspect-a name, location, IP address, or image and in various languages. With artificial intelligence tools, a vast amount of intelligence from across open sources to the deep and dark web can be gathered, networked, and mapped within seconds.

The digital forensic tools can, with the click of a button, retrieve and analyze the data collected from various sources and provide unmatched intelligence by identifying malicious profiles, location, group structure, and others. Cyber forensics can also generate relevant alerts when intelligence is detected, as well as generate customizable automated reports which can be extracted when needed.

With social media websites giving rise to an unprecedented volume of intelligence for security agencies, open-source intelligence, or OSINT, is a treasure trove of information allowing investigators to obtain critical information.

Cobwebs’ automated analysis of multiple languages also enables investigators to identify malicious chatter related to the COVID-19 pandemic across all layers of the internet. The harvesting of intelligence is assisted by AI, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP), which automatically monitor and prioritize alerts.

With web intelligence capabilities providing the algorithms to identify and mitigate threats, authorities can remain one step ahead of cybercriminals who aim to make big profits from the deadly coronavirus pandemic.

In times of crisis, it is crucial to identify and block cyber-threats attempting to exploit the uncertainty surrounding the current situation as quickly as possible. Cobwebs’ automated tools can identify and alert authorities to the cybercrime and prevent the threat actors from further malicious attacks.