Spam and Phishing

Q2 2021 spam and phishing statistics, plus main trends: corporate mail phishing, compensation fraud, WhatsApp scam, etc.

In mid-March 2021, we observed two new spam campaigns delivering banking Trojans. The payload in most cases was IcedID, but we have also seen a few QBot (aka QakBot) samples.

This article analyzes different ways of the spoofing email addresses through changing the From header, which provides information about the sender’s name and address.

In the EU, 70% of user computers experienced at least one Malware-class attack, 115,452,157 web attacks and 86,584,675 phishing attempts were blocked.

In terms of spam and phishing, in Q1 2021, we largely saw a continuation of the 2020 trends: exploitation of COVID-19 theme, hunting corporate account credentials and spoofing of online store websites.

This research is a continuation of our annual financial threat reports providing an overview of the latest trends and key events across the financial threat landscape. The study covers the common phishing threats, along with Windows and Android-based financial malware.

Organizations can become a target of doxing. Corporate doxing poses a serious financial and reputational threat to a company.

COVID-19 spam, corporate phishing, fake videoconferences and other trends and figures of 2020.

More than six years have passed since the banking Trojan Emotet was first detected. During this time it has repeatedly mutated, changed direction, acquired partners, picked up modules, and generally been the cause of high-profile incidents and multimillion-dollar losses.

Our approach enables real-time blocking of attacks that use such domains as soon as they appear.

The COVID-19 topic, which appeared in Q1 this year, is still in play for spammers and phishers. In our view, the so-called second wave could lead to a surge in mailings offering various coronavirus-related treatments.

This past spring, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, online learning became the new norm as universities and classrooms around the world were forced to close their doors. By April 29, 2020, more than 1.2 billion children across 186 countries were impacted by school closures. Shortly after schools began to transition to emergency remote learning,

In Q2 2020, the largest share of spam (51.45 percent) was recorded in April. The average percentage of spam in global email traffic was 50,18%, down by 4.43 percentage points from the previous reporting period.

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.