Spain death toll hits 9,053 as COVID-19 cases pass 100,000

The coronavirus death toll in Spain surged over 9,000 on Wednesday after a record 864 deaths in 24 hours, with the number of confirmed cases passing the 100,000 mark, the government said.

Spain has the world’s second-highest death toll after Italy, with the virus so far claiming 9,053 lives and the number of confirmed cases reaching 102,136.

But on a day-to-day basis, the rate of new infections continued its downward trend, showing an increase of just over 8.0 percent, compared with nearly 11 percent on Tuesday, health ministry figures showed.

Also read: Cyber security: how attackers impersonate WHO, on Covid-19

And the death rate has also slowed, from 27 percent a week ago to 10.5 percent on Wednesday, with officials saying the data appear to show the epidemic is reaching its peak.

But officials have warned that even if the epidemic is peaking, the pressure on the intensive care system would be subject to a lag of at least a week or longer, with hospitals likely to reach crisis point by the end of this week or early next.

Madrid remains the worst-hit region, with 3,865 deaths and nearly 30,000 cases, leaving hospitals and mortuaries overwhelmed. (Punch)

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Cyber security: How attackers impersonate WHO, on COVID-19

Cyber security company, SophosLabs has revealed that email scams associated with coronavirus, COVID-19 have nearly tripled in the past weeks.

According to Uncut blog, the scammers are using domain names like spam, phishing attacks, and malware to attack people’s devices.

For instance, the criminals are using different means such as fake shipping and delivery emails to convince unsuspecting victims into opening attachments and infecting their computers with the Kryptik Trojan.

The report revealed that attackers are increasingly impersonating the World Health Organization, WHO, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, North America and the United Nations, UN, as evidenced in scams tracked by SophosLabs.

Speaking on the development, Sophos Principal Research Scientist, Chester Wisniewski, said: “Cybercriminals are wasting no time in shifting their dirty, tried and true attack campaigns toward advantageous lures that prey on mounting virus fears.

It’s easy to see, for example, that the attackers behind a new Chloroquine scam are the same as those behind a recent herbal Viagra scam”.

Wisniewski emphasised that “With global spam volumes estimated to be in the hundreds of billions, for 2-3 percent of those to be COVID-19 themed is significant.

Similar to A/B testing of advertisements and web pages, criminals often dip a toe in the water when there is a new or sensational topic in the news. If the new topic proves a more effective lure than the previous scam bait they begin switching to new lures.

a new or sensational topic in the news. If the new topic proves a more effective lure than the previous scam bait they begin switching to new lures.

“In fact, in one of the spam campaigns we tracked this week, there was evidence of exactly that. These particular criminals had been using fake shipping and delivery emails to convince unsuspecting victims into opening attachments and infecting their computers with the Kryptik Trojan. 

Now the main body of the email pretends to come from erecruit@who.int with “health advice” in the attachment, but when we carefully inspect the plain text body, we see it matches a previous spam campaign from this same criminal using a lure pretending to be about invoices and deliveries.

“The increases we are seeing are likely due to two important factors. First, as time passes more and more criminal groups are joining the party on using all this interest in COVID-19 to steal money from people. Secondly, it takes time.

Any given criminal group has to handcraft the spams to convince the recipient to take an action. In the research community we call this the call to action.

The call to action might be to open the attachment, visit the website or, in the case of the WHO Bitcoin scam (attached), to donate cryptocurrencies to criminal controlled Bitcoin wallets. Crafting these messages takes time, especially for those who are not native English speakers.

“Even the most innocuous mention of something by a politician or a celebrity can lend to a scam credibility or present a new business opportunity. Two recent examples come to mind.

One spam campaign offering to tell you about the government cover up and attempting to sell you a COVID-19 survival guide used celebrity Gwyneth Paltrow as a lure in its subject line.

A tipoff the email is a fake is the incorrect spelling of her first name as Gwenith, but this could easily be missed or glossed over.

“A few days ago President Donald Trump mentioned the possible efficacy of a drug called Chloroquine against Coronavirus immediately leading to WordPress blog comment spammers switching from pitching herbal Viagra to attempting to sell Chloroquine, which can be quite dangerous when not taken under the supervision of a doctor.

And within only two days of the WHO creating a charity called the Solidarity Response Fund, criminals were soliciting Bitcoin donations pretending to be the charity, even implying your donation is fully tax deductible in the US or Europe,” he remarked.( Vanguard)

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Aussie watchdog sues Facebook over Cambridge Analytica breach

Australia’s privacy watchdog announced legal action against Facebook Monday for alleged “systematic failures” exposing more than 300,000 Australians to a data breach by Cambridge Analytica.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner said it had initiated proceedings against the tech giant and that Facebook committed “serious and/or repeated interferences with privacy”.

The commission alleges the personal information of Australian Facebook users was disclosed without their permission to an app called “This Is Your Digital Life”, which then sold the data to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

The now-defunct British company was at the centre of a massive scandal involving Facebook data hijacking in 2018.

US regulators said the firm “engaged in deceptive practices to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting”.

Australia’s watchdog began its own investigation into Cambridge Analytica two years ago, with today’s announcement it was pursuing Facebook in the courts the first action resulting from the probe.

“Facebook’s default settings facilitated the disclosure of personal information, including sensitive information, at the expense of privacy,” Australian Information and Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk said.

“We claim these actions left the personal data of around 311,127 Australian Facebook users exposed to be sold and used for purposes including political profiling, well outside users’ expectations.”

Facebook’s own investigation found that some data from 87 million users in the United States and elsewhere had been compromised by the firm, and claimed the practices violated the social network’s terms of service.

In a statement, Facebook said it had “actively engaged” with the Australian investigation but refused to comment further on the specifics of the matter as it was before the court.

The company added it had made “major changes” to its platforms in consultation with international regulators to “restrict the information available to app developers, implement new governance protocols and build industry-leading controls to help people protect and manage their data”.

It paid a record $5 billion penalty in a settlement with the US regulator, while in the UK was fined more than $650,000 for the breach.

It is unclear how much Facebook could be fined if the Australian action succeeds, but each contravention of Australia’s Privacy Act attracts a maximum penalty of Aus$1.7 million ($1.1 million). (Vanguard)

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Facebook says it will ban ads for medical face masks

Facebook is temporarily banning advertisements for medical face masks as part of an effort to prevent use of its platform to exploit people’s concerns about the new coronavirus.

The ban covers advertisements on the social media platform as well as commercial listings on Facebook Marketplace, the company said. Facebook said it would begin to enforce the ban over the next few days.

“Our teams are monitoring the COVID-19 situation closely and will make necessary updates to our policies if we see people trying to exploit this public health emergency,” Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, said in a statement issued late Friday.

Facebook noted that it previously announced a ban on ads that make claims about the health benefits of a particular product or guaranteed that “a product will prevent someone from contracting” the disease.

Some public health officials have urged people to stop buying masks. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome M. Adams noted in a tweet on Feb. 29 that masks aren’t effective in protecting the general public “but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

In a separate development, Amtrak announced that it was canceling its nonstop Acela passenger train service between Washington, D.C., and New York City through late May because of a sharp drop in demand.

That service will be canceled starting Tuesday and through May 28, Amtrak said.

The cancellation does not affect Amtrak’s other high-speed Acela service connecting Washington, New York, and Boston, which runs several times per day with limited stops.(Vanguard)

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India’s top court strikes down ban on cryptocurrency trading

India’s top court struck down a ban on cryptocurrency trading by the country’s central bank, ending a nearly two-year legal battle to get the virtual currencies reinstated in the country.

The Supreme Court of India on Wednesday overturned a 2018 ruling by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which prohibited Indian banks from dealing with cryptocurrency exchanges over “concerns of consumer protection, market integrity and money laundering, among others.

“The central bank’s ban came after months of scrutiny of digital currencies by financial regulators as well as the government, which compared them to “Ponzi schemes” and threatened to impose harsh regulations.

The RBI gave Indian banks three months to sever ties with all entities dealing in virtual currencies.

The inability to use Indian banks for their operations crippled the country’s exchanges that dealt in currencies such as bitcoin, ripple and ethereum, forcing many of them to shut down operations.

Despite its population and online presence, India only accounted for around 3% of the global cryptocurrency market before the ban, according to estimates by crypto entrepreneur Sathvik Vishwanath.

But growing interest in virtual currencies meant there was “tremendous scope going forward,” Vishwanath, cofounder and CEO of Indian cryptocurrency exchange Unocoin.

Several exchanges challenged the ban in court, represented by the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

The court ultimately agreed, ruling that there had been no visible damage to banks regulated by the RBI and a complete ban on cryptocurrency trading was not “proportionate.

“Indian cryptocurrency exchanges celebrated the verdict.”The win belongs to the entire crypto community in India,” Vishwanath wrote in a blog post.

Zebpay, another prominent exchange, said on Twitter that its servers went down hours after the verdict because the number of people logging on “exceeded our biggest estimates.”

“We will not stop here,” the company wrote following the court decision. “We will continue to engage with the government to bring positive regulations.” (CNN)

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