# Scam Pandemic: How Attackers Exploit Public Fear through Phishing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12843 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12843/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [PhishClone: Measuring the Efficacy of Cloning Evasion Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01582/) (2022)
- [Comparative Analysis of Black-Box and White-Box Machine Learning Model in Phishing Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02084/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As the COVID-19 pandemic started triggering widespread lockdowns across the globe, cybercriminals did not hesitate to take advantage of users' increased usage of the Internet and their reliance on it. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive measurement study of online social engineering attacks in the early months of the pandemic. By collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing DNS records, TLS certificates, phishing URLs, phishing website source code, phishing emails, web traffic to phishing websites, news articles, and government announcements, we track trends of phishing activity between January and May 2020 and seek to understand the key implications of the underlying trends. We find that phishing attack traffic in March and April 2020 skyrocketed up to 220% of its pre-COVID-19 rate, far exceeding typical seasonal spikes. Attackers exploited victims' uncertainty and fear related to the pandemic through a variety of highly targeted scams, including emerging scam types against which current defenses are not sufficient as well as traditional phishing which outpaced the ecosystem's collective response.