Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365 Security and the blog's author, told Business Insider that the cyberattacks follow the pandemic around the world geographically.
"What you're seeing in the map is that the success of these attacks is a direct correlation to the size of growth of the pandemic," said Lefferts. "Countries with the highest outbreak numbers are also the most affected by these COVID-themed lures. Confusion, concern, and fear are driving people to click and that's what attackers are taking advantage of."
Microsoft observes: "Every country in the world has seen at least one COVID-19 themed attack (see map). The volume of successful attacks in outbreak-hit countries is increasing, as fear and the desire for information grows. Our telemetry shows that China, the United States, and Russia have been hit the hardest.
They also confirm what our own researchers have shown, that there is a change in lures: attackers of all sorts are changing their campaigns to COVID-19 themed templates. Redmond also goes into attack percentages, explains it's not all that bad, and how they protect against these threats. Recommended reading: