Why govt should put out a public service announcement about Coronavirus outbreak
02 March, 2020
India has been unscathed by the coronavirus scare as yet but that's no reason behind complacency. Apart from all the screening and quarantine measures normally it takes, it can also intensify its awareness campaign. Among the first steps a government should take is to issue public service announcements cautioning persons against fake information.
A scan of new websites by a worldwide cybersecurity firm last month revealed that cybercriminals are exploiting the public’s have to know by targeting them with scams.
One fake website spotted by the firm Check Point Software was vaccinecovid-19.com, created on February 11, 2020 in Russia. It includes to sell “the very best and quickest test for Coronavirus detection at the fantastic price of 19,000 Russian rubles (USD 300 or Rs 20,000)," tech website TechCrunch reported.
On Saturday, america STATE DEPT. tracked down as much as 2 million fake tweets about the COVID-19 outbreak, the Washington Post reported on Saturday. That was 7 % of the tweets trawled through to look for fakes. It proved that the more the general public googled about COVID-19, the more fake information had been discussed on Twitter.
Much of they were tweets about conspiracy theories claiming that the virus was actually a bioweapon created by the Chinese government or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or that there were predictions decades ago about a deadly virus while it began with Wuhan and so on.
Beyond conspiracy theories, the public’s interest in the virus outbreak has galvanised malicious components into spreading attachments containing Trojan viruses that get downloaded on to the users’ phones and laptops when opened.
The risk in a country such as for example India where WhatsApp is a favorite platform for spreading fake news, is that claims about herbal cures for COVID-19 are doing the rounds, riding on the trust that persons have in the original Ayurvedic system of medicine.
India continues to be among the least affected by COVID-19, but there have been almost no measures in location to avoid the spread of the pathogen.
Source: www.deccanchronicle.com
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