APT Groups Target Healthcare and Essential Services

Summary

A joint alert from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) was released today containing information on continued exploitation by advanced persistent threat (APT) groups of the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic. It includes information describing the methods these actors are using to target organizations and provides mitigation advice. The organizations currently being targeted are involved in both national and international COVID-19 responses, and include healthcare, pharmaceutical, academia, medical research, and local government organizations.

This joint CISA-NCSC Alert (AA20-126A) is an update to joint CISA-NCSC Alert (AA20-099A) and provides an update to ongoing malicious cyber activity relating to COVID-19. For a graphical summary of CISA’s joint COVID-19 Alerts with NCSC, see the following  guide.

Reporting

The NJCCIC encourages recipients who discover signs of malicious cyber activity to contact the NJCCIC via the cyber incident report form by clicking here.

Please do not hesitate to contact the NJCCIC at njccic@cyber.nj.gov with any questions.