CISA explains critical sectors. COVID-19 disinformation. Fraud and spoofing. Fancy Bear is back.

The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, has issued guidance for how organizations should consider organizing their work (and employees) during the present COVID-19 emergency. CISA stresses that the recommendations are advisory in nature, but they do suggest how organizations might decide who needs to report, physically, to the job and who might work remotely. They also suggest ways of arranging workplaces and work schedules to “reduce the likelihood of spreading the disease.” A number of the jobs the recommendations discuss are directly concerned with cybersecurity. As the Voice of America and others point out, the risk of cyberattack rises with the incidence of telework.

Iran appears to have suffered particularly badly from COVID-19, with an acknowledged 17,361 cases, 1135 of which have proven fatal, Foreign Policy reports. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has mounted a domestic influence campaign to place responsibility for the pandemic on its two usual suspects: the US and Israel.

Some of the fictions circulating about the pandemic are disinformation, others promote fraud, while still others are popular bits of misinformation. Tenable has a rundown of fake cures, phony government statements, and simple panicky mistakes (often amplified by fearful conspiracy theories). IBM has found one set of hoaxed communiques that pretend to be from the World Health Organization--they’re vectors for HawkEye malware.

Trend Micro reports that APT28 (whom you may recognize as Fancy Bear, Russia’s GRU) is using previously compromised corporate email accounts to spearphish for credentials in the defense sector.