Spam and Phishing

The end of the year is traditionally a time for reflection – for taking stock of our lives before considering what lies ahead. We’d like to offer our customary retrospective of the key events that shaped the threat landscape in 2014.

This section of the report forms part of the Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2014 and is based on data obtained and processed using Kaspersky Security Network (KSN). Kaspersky Lab products detected and neutralized a total of 6,167,233,068 threats during the reported period.

Next year Kaspersky Lab experts anticipate high-stakes targeted cyber-attacks pinpointing the banks. We expect fraudsters will try to develop new malware that can take cash directly from ATMs. 2015 is also likely to bring even more privacy concerns, security worries about Apple devices and renewed fears about connected devices.

Most phishing emails that aim to steal bank and e-payment data are written in English. However, we are seeing more and more fraudulent messages written in other languages.

The share of spam in email traffic for the third quarter of 2014 was 66.9%, which is 1.7 percentage points less than in the last quarter. The topics of spam in the third quarter strongly reflected major news events such as political developments in Ukraine, the leak of network passwords from major mail services.

Cybercriminals and other threat actors also have normal lives – they shop at the same places we do, they eat the same food we eat, and they hire the same services we do.

In October cybercriminals used the tumult around the Ebola virus to send letters containing malware Backdoor.Win32.DarkKomet.dtzn.

The percentage of spam in September’s email traffic averaged 66.5%, which is 0.7 percentage points down from August. The amount of unsolicited email consistently decreased throughout the month – in early September the percentage of spam averaged 69.3% while in the end it dropped to 63.1%.

The percentage of spam in August’s email traffic averaged 67.2%, which is only 0.2 percentage points up from July. The amount of unsolicited email increased throughout the month – in early August the percentage of spam averaged 64.9% while in the end it reached 70.4%.

It used to be a common scam: Russian cybercriminals would send an SMS like: “Mom, I’m in trouble. Please, transfer me some funds. I will explain it properly when I get home”.

Well-known companies and brands are favorite targets for fraudsters. After all, it is much easier to get people’s attention with the use of a popular name. In this article, we will analyze phishing and malicious emails sent by fraudsters on behalf of international delivery services.

An organization recently asked Kaspersky Lab to investigate an incident that had occurred in its corporate remote banking system: a bank asked for confirmation of a payment worth about US$80,000. The organization’s accountant had not made the payments himself, so the organization suspected a malware attack. But how was that possible?

Anyone using the Internet is at risk, regardless of age and regardless of what they like to do online. Cybercriminals can deploy an impressive arsenal and use it to get access to our money, our personal data and the resources of our computer systems.

The percentage of spam in email traffic averaged 67%, which is 2.2 percentage points up from June. The highest spam levels were seen during the second week of the month (67.6%), and the lowest levels were seen in the first week (66%). In July 2014, Kaspersky Lab’s anti-phishing component registered 20,157,877 detections.

In Q2 2014, the percentage of spam in all email traffic came to 68.6%, up 2.2 pp from the previous quarter. A peak was reached in April and since then the share of unwanted messages in email traffic has been falling gradually. During the second quarter Kaspersky Lab’s anti-phishing component registered 60,090,173 detections.