RiskIQ creates COVID-19 Internet Intelligence Gateway to fight cybercrime

RiskIQ, announced the launch of the COVID-19 Internet Intelligence Gateway, a free, one-stop cybersecurity resource center. With thousands of newly created COVID-19-related websites launching daily, the gateway accepts submissions of suspicious URLs or emails, providing a lookup service that taps into RiskIQ’s massive global crawling infrastructure to analyze and compile malicious URLs related to COVID-19.

Security practitioners can lookup any suspicious COVID-19 URL via the Gateway. Submissions are crawled and analyzed by RiskIQ’s systems and the results sent back. Because each malicious URL is added to RiskIQ blacklists through community participation, the site will become an authoritative source of intelligence that practitioners can use to block and investigate COVID-19 scams as they increase on an unprecedented scale.

“Our goal with the Gateway is to help the security community work together in our response to the influx of criminal activity,” said RiskIQ CEO Lou Manousos. “The COVID-19 Internet Intelligence Gateway will be a powerful resource for keeping organizations safe during this crisis.”

FBI cybercrime reports have quadrupled, and phishing attacks surged 350% after the pandemic started. Currently, Google blocks 18 million COVID-19 scam emails daily, and RiskIQ noted 317k new websites related to COVID-19 over just two weeks.

The Gateway compiles and improves upon the catalog of complimentary resources RiskIQ released in the early days of the pandemic to empower the cybersecurity community, which is battling a massive spike in cyber threats related to COVID-19. Users who sign up for the COVID-19 Internet Intelligence Gateway will also have access to RiskIQ’s other complimentary offerings:

  • COVID-19 Daily Intelligence reports compiled by RiskIQ’s agency-trained analysts. This intelligence helps improve situational awareness and inform security teams, which face new requirements during these times.
  • Lists of new infrastructure related to COVID-19 observed by RiskIQ’s global crawling network, updated daily. Security teams can download newly observed hosts and URL intelligence to aid in investigations and improve their organization’s security posture.
  • Email Intelligence, including top subject lines to help educate users on COVID-19 scams and malware. RiskIQ analyzes thousands of emails to provide crucial insights security teams can leverage toward protecting employees and customers.
  • Free Digital Footprint Snapshot, a quick and easy way to understand digital assets that belong to your organization outside the firewall so you can secure them from a spike in COVID-19-related cybercrime.
  • A 30-day PassiveTotal query boost enables analysts to ramp-up their investigations of COVID-19 threats with RiskIQ’s unique data sets.
  • Updated COVID-19 Blacklists compiled by RiskIQ. Security teams can block these blacklists of known bad infrastructure to immediately to protect their organization from new campaigns leveraging the COVID-19 crisis.

Sign up for the RiskIQ COVID-19 Internet Intelligence Gateway here. Also, you can download the RiskIQ COVID-19 Chrome Extension, which allow users to submit suspect URLs, hostnames, or domains to RiskIQ for crawling purposes. Results from the crawl will show up under the submissions tab from the pop-up menu and link