Spam and Phishing

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.

Promises to marry a potential groom if he covers his bride-to-be’s travel expenses to his hometown are a fairly common feature of fraudulent spam. Less common are more ‘noble’ offers of help.

This week, our virus lab handled a case where a customer received a phishing email with an Android Backdoor archive masquerading as a Kaspersky mobile security app.

Kaspersky Lab products detected and neutralized a total of 995,534,410 threats in the second quarter of 2014. 927,568 computers running Kaspersky Lab products were attacked by banking malware. 65,118 new malicious mobile programs were detected. 2033 mobile banking Trojans were detected in this period, 1.7 times more than last quarter.

Recently I stumbled upon some spam-ads on Facebook, which didn’t look very unusual at first glance. It’s common for spammers to rely on social engineering techniques. They typically creating fake profiles, joining random open (or closed) groups and share links to shady e-commerce sites or survey-scams – always with catchy claims to lure the readers

In June, high-profile news events such as the FIFA World Cup and the situation in Ukraine were exploited by fraudsters to extract money and financial information from users. The holiday season has brought an increase in the number of fake notifications from various booking services containing malicious attachments.

Cybercriminals around the world have already started to point their guns and attacks at the new gTLDs, the ‘generic Top Level Domains’ approved by ICANN and offered by registrars to people interested in buying a new domain name. Recently we found malicious activities including malware and phishing pages registered in the top level domains .club,

At the end of last week we came across a curious method of distributing links to a phishing page that collects users’ personal data.