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Navy CIO: 'Malicious Cyber Actors' Attacking Military Telework Infrastructure - USNI News:

Adversaries are taking on the Navy's shift to remote work in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the service's chief information officer.

Speaking at the Department of the Navy's Gold Coast Small Business Procurement event today, Navy CIO Aaron Weis said the service saw a jump in malicious activity as employees began teleworking to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

"We've seen a number of potential exploits by malicious cyber actors. Kind of the easiest stuff and because everyone is super responsive and working from home – lots of phishing activity. And Especially early on, if it said COVID-19 in the subject line, you were going to open it," Weis said.

"And really then that's the front door and then getting somebody to click on an attachment or whatnot that you can get into somebody's face with a COVID-themed message," he continued. "The other is – there was an uptick in the registration of domain names that contain COVID, COVID-19, along with DOD specific variants of that, as the services rushed to push out tracking, tracing capability services, etc, for use in this teleworking environment."

Weis did not provide details as to where the attacks originated. In addition to phishing and using registered domain names, Weis said the Navy also saw an increase in "spoofing" activities, with attackers sending messages looking like they were from "trustworthy sources." Weis praised U.S. Cyber Command, Marine Corps Cyberspace Command and U.S. Fleet Cyber Command for swiftly responding to the attempts.

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