April 22, 2020 / Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff
The rise in coronavirus-themed scams was expected, but the numbers are surprising even the most experienced cybersecurity researchers.
In the first three months of the year, there were at least 2,022 malicious and 40,261 “high-risk” newly registered websites and domains, according to Palo Alto Networks. That’s out of a total of 116,357 coronavirus-related, newly registered domain names tracked by the company. 
The researchers labeled domains “malicious” when they were either phishing pages trying to steal visitors’ personal data and passwords, or if they were serving malware. There was a 569% growth in registrations of such sites between February and March, the researchers discovered.