Campaigns of this type often pop up around major news events, when hackers elicit curiosity and emotional reactions to try to lure unsuspecting users to fraudulent websites.
“Cybercriminals thrive on chaos and curiosity,” said Rafa Lopez, a security engineer at Check Point. “Whenever a major news event occurs, we see a sharp rise in scams designed to exploit public interest.”
Researchers have called this “cyber threat opportunism,” a phenomenon that spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Google identified 18 million malware and phishing Gmail messages per day related to the pandemic.
Instagram’s parent company Meta and TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
