An Experimental Analysis on Detection of Corona Virus Malware Attacks and Its Preventive Measures

Introduction

Cybercrime involves crime using computers, network, internet communication and any digital devices connected to the Internet. Cybercrimes are performed by the criminals having bad intention to damage, steal or modify data or information stored in computer or any other digital devices. There are several types of cybercrime attack. Phishing attack is one of the type of cybercrime attack. Some examples of cyber-attacks are discussed below:

• a.

  Denial-of-Service (DoS): sends flood of packets to exhaust the resource.

• b.

  Man-in-Middle Attack: here attacker act as intruder between server and client communication.

• c.

  Phishing Attack: In this type of attack, the attacker sends spam and malicious email that pretend to be from trusted network.

• d.

  Password Attack: In this type of attack, hacker tries to crack the password.

• e.

  SQL Injection Attack: Here hacker tries to hack database by executing invalid SQL queries.

• f.

  Cross-Site Scripting: Here cyber-criminal runs some script on a vulnerable web browser and hack the web browser.

• g.

  Eavesdropping Attack: In this type of attack, the attacker grasps some confidential information that an individual is sending through network.

• h.

  Malware Attack: Cyber criminal’s motive is to spread malware like virus, trojan, worms etc. to a victim’s system or network.

Phishing attack is a type of cyber-attack where cybercriminal collect or gather the information or credentials like user name and password and other details through fake websites or spam emails. Phishing attack is a type of social engineering attack where cyber criminals gain the trust of a victim through fake website and spam emails. Steps of Phishing attack are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Steps of Phishing attack

Types of Phishing Attacks:

• a.

  CEO Fraud/Business Emails: Cyber-criminal sends emails to lower level employees who works in accounting or finance department. The goal of these emails is often to get their victim to transfer funds to a fake account. In this attack the attacker clones a authenticated message and send it to a victim

• b.

  Domain Spoofing: In this attack the attacker creates a fake website and ask user to enter their credential.

• c.

  Evil Twin: Attacker creates a fake Wi-Fi access point which appears as authentic. If any victim connects itself to this access point the hacker collects all the information from the packets travelling through this point.

• d.

  HTTPS Phishing: In this approach the cybercriminals send spam emails that pretends to be authentic to victim. This email contains malicious links in the body. If a user clicks on the link it gets hacked

• e.

  Smishing: Here attacker sends malicious payloads with the text messages and convince victim to download that infected file and in turn it gets infected.

• f.

  Spear Phishing: Hacker sends a bulk of spam messages with malicious content pretending as a campaign to the individuals of an organisation.

• g.

  Vishing: Cyber criminals call through a phone to a victim and try to collect confidential data by gaining trust of the victim.

Malwares are nothing but a malicious code which exploits the vulnerabilities of a system. These malicious codes may hide themselves in packets to bypass the Antivirus, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) or Firewall. These malwares may attach themselves in some documents, program codes to spread themselves over the internet. Cyber criminals develop such malicious code and target a vulnerable system to attack and exploit the system. Various types of malwares are as follows: