08 December 2021  —  Eric Swotinsky
Incident reports

Coronavirus-related phishing lures rise amid Omicron fears

Fear of the recent Omicron COVID-19 variant is providing fuel for phishing campaigns. One analysis indicates that vaccine-related phishing attacks have increased by at least 26%.

One recently spotted phishing campaign of note has been targeting people in the U.K.. Attackers are sending out emails that are ripe with misinformation regarding the variant and contain links to a fake NHS website that harvests personal information. Victims are also prompted for money to pay for processing fees, thus exposing their financial information.

Even savvy individuals can fall for phishing scams from time to time, and it only takes one such event to compromise an entire enterprise's IT infrastructure. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Advanced Email Security solves this issue by filtering out phishing and malware-laden emails, preventing them from reaching users' inboxes in the first place.