Spam and Phishing

Cyber threats aren’t relegated to the world of big businesses and large-scale campaigns. The most frequent attacks aren’t APTs and massive data breaches—they’re the daily encounters with malware and spam by everyday users.

Glancing at the results of Q1 2020, we anticipate that the COVID-19 topic will continue to be actively used by cybercriminals for the foreseeable future. To attract potential victims, the pandemic will be mentioned even on “standard” fake pages and in spam mailings.

Methodology Financial cyberthreats are malicious programs that target users of services such as online banking, e-money, and cryptocurrency, or that attempt to gain access to financial organizations and their infrastructure. These threats are usually accompanied by spam and phishing activities, with malicious users creating fake financial-themed pages and emails to steal victims’ credentials. In order

In the search for new ways to bypass spam filters, attackers are developing new methods of delivering their messages. This year, they made active use of various Google services, as well as popular social networks and video hosting sites.

Shortly before Christmas and New Year scammers send themed spam, and offer fake sales, promotions, and payouts.

Top in this quarter’s list of spam-source countries is China, with a share of 20.43%. Our security solutions blocked 48,089,352 malicious mail attachments, while Backdoor.Win32.Androm became the most common mail-based malware family.

Every year, Kaspersky releases an annual Black Friday alert to highlight how fraudsters may capitalize on increased levels of online shopping at this time of year when many brands are offering their customers appealing discounts.

One of the most popular platforms among users (and hence cybercriminals) is Steam, and we’ve been observing money-making schemes to defraud its users for quite some time. Since June, however, such attacks have become more frequent and, compared to previous attempts, far more sophisticated.

Cybercriminals continue to look for new ways to deliver spam and improve old ones. In Q2, they used popular Google services to distribute spam. Blackmailers are also trying out new methods. Alongside threats to ordinary users, attempts were made to blackmail companies by threatening to send spam mailings in their name.

In Q1 2019, the average share of spam in global mail traffic rose by 0.06 p.p. to 55.97%, and the Anti-Phishing system prevented more than 111,832,308 redirects to phishing sites, up 35,220,650 in comparison with the previous reporting period.

2018 showed that cybercriminals continue to keep a close eye on global events and use them to achieve their goals. We have seen a steady increase in phishing attacks on cryptocurrency-related resources, and expect new scams to appear in 2019.

The presented report continues the series of Kaspersky Lab reports that provide an overview of how the financial threat landscape has evolved over the years. It covers the common phishing threats that users encounter, along with Windows-based and Android-based financial malware.

We examined malware disguised as pornographic content, and malware that hunts for credentials to access pornography websites. We looked at the threats that are attacking users across the internet in order to find out which popular websites might be dangerous to visit. Additionally, we checked our phishing and spam database to see if there is a lot of pornographic content on file and how is it used in the wild.

This website for volunteers in Venezuela appeared online on February 6th. Only a few days later, on February 11th, the day after the public announcement of the initiative, another almost identical website appeared with a very similar domain name and structure.

All too often, both rely on manipulating human psychology as a way of compromising entire systems or individual computers. Increasingly, the devices targeted also include those that we don’t consider to be computers – from children’s toys to security cameras. Here is our annual round-up of major incidents and key trends from 2018