#COVID19 Led to Surge in Malware Attacks Last Year The cybersecurity firm detected that cyber-attacks went up by 15% last year compared to 2019, observing that the rate of scams rose and fell at the same rate and time as the virus appeared across the world. The peak rate of blocked attempts was in April, during the first wave of the pandemic. As COVID-19 cases rose again in the final quarter of 2020, malware attacks correspondingly went up rapidly, with a correlation found between the number of attacks launched and the number of people working from home. One major tactic utilized has been the development of special variants of well-known malware families that use COVID-19 lures to entice unsuspecting users to install them on their devices. An example highlighted in the study was a variant of the Android banking Trojan ‘Cereberus,’ which in many cases was distributed via phishing messages under the name ‘Corona-App.apk.’ The total number of Andorid banking Trojans detected in 2020 went up by 35% year-on-year, which the authors partially attributed to increasing use of mobile banking during the pandemic.