Cyber volunteers needed to help protect our health services during the Coronavirus outbreak

A good time to offer a virtual helping hand.

Graham Cluley @ 4:51 pm, March 30, 2020
@[email protected]
@gcluley

An organisation, Cyber Volunteers 19 (CV19), is being set up to help people volunteer their IT security expertise and services to health services.

The idea is that IT security-savvy folks can help hard-working healthcare services battling the Covid-19 Coronavirus pandemic, by volunteering their expertise in identifying, protecting, detecting and responding to existing and emerging cyber threats.

Cyber Volunteers 19- we are:
– giving advice
– providing intel
– promoting best practice
– caring collaborators
– volunteers- no money being paid!

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We are NOT:
– a cyber army
– vigilantes
– people who “hack back”
– corporate and personal promotion mechanism

— Cyber Volunteers 19 (@Cv19Cyber) March 25, 2020

Healthcare organisations are working under enough pressure at the moment without having the additional challenge of battling cyber threats. This is one way in which we can give a little back.

Learn more about how to get involved at cyberv19.org.uk and follow @Cv19Cyber on Twitter.

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Security threats

#Coronavirus

Graham Cluley • @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

3 comments on “Cyber volunteers needed to help protect our health services during the Coronavirus outbreak”

Spryte

March 31, 2020 at 3:00 pm

There is also the Covid 19 Domain Classifier (https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Covid19+Domain+Classifier/25958/)
From their site:
> "These last couple of weeks, criminals have been using COVID-19 for everything from selling fake cures to phishing. Every day, several thousand domains are registered for COVID-19 related keywords. We are trying to identify the worst, and classify the domains into different risk categories. If you have some time this weekend, please help us out by checking out some of these domains." <
Filtering these domains can help avoid scams, fishing and people getting malicious software.
You'll need a spare computer which you can rebuild easily should you get malicious software.
Unfortunately the process is not automated, one by one, to categorize.

Reply
1. Graham Cluley · in reply to Spryte
  
  March 31, 2020 at 6:53 pm
  
  Thanks Spryte. Another resource which may be useful to people is this list of dodgy Coronavirus-related domains, updated daily by the folks at DomainTools:
  
  https://www.domaintools.com/resources/blog/free-covid-19-threat-list-domain-risk-assessments-for-coronavirus-threats
  
  Reply
  1. coyote · in reply to Graham Cluley
    
    April 4, 2020 at 10:19 pm
    
    $ wc -l dt-covid-19-threat-list.csv
    116711 dt-covid-19-threat-list.csv
    
    … That is appalling. And tragic.
    
    Reply