- The alert was a joint alert from the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
- According to a CERT Alert, both U.S. and U.K. “”are currently investigating a number of incidents in which threat actors are targeting pharmaceutical companies, medical research organizations and universities”.
- “CISA and NCSC continue to see indications that advanced persistent threat (APT) groups are exploiting the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic as part of their cyber operations.”
- The attackers are using “password spraying”, a brute force attack in which the attacker tries commonly used passwords against many accounts.
- The alert does not specify which countries are actively attacking the US/UK targets.