Spam and Phishing

Quite recently, we started to designate an entire class of sites — gift card generators — as fraudulent, despite their not stealing any money or personal data from visitors. Why? Let’s try to unpick these sites and see how they work.

While the legal status of cryptocurrencies and laws to regulate them continue to be hammered out, scammers are busy exploiting the digital gold rush. Besides hacking cryptocurrency exchanges, exploiting smart-contract vulnerabilities, and deploying malicious miners, cybercriminals are also resorting to more traditional social-engineering methods that can reap millions of dollars.

There are only two weeks to go before the start of the massive soccer event — FIFA World Cup. This championship has already attracted the attention of millions worldwide, including a fair few cybercriminals. Long before kick-off, email accounts began bulging with soccer-related spam, and scammers started exploiting the topic in mailings and creating World Cup-themed phishing pages.

The quarter’s main topic, one that we will likely return to many times this year, is personal data. It remains one of the most sought-after wares in the world of information technology for app and service developers, owners of various agencies, and, of course, cybercriminals. Unfortunately, many users still fail to grasp the need to protect their personal information and don’t pay attention to who and how their data is transferred in social media.

In May, while monitoring Roaming Mantis, aka MoqHao and XLoader, we observed significant changes in their M.O. The group’s activity expanded geographically and they broadened their attack/evasion methods. Their landing pages and malicious apk files now support 27 languages covering Europe and the Middle East.

In late 2017, information appeared on specialized resources about a Telegram ICO to finance the launch of its own blockchain platform. The lack of information provided fertile ground for scammers: the rumors prompted mailshots seemingly from official representatives of the platform, inviting people to take part in the ICO and purchase tokens.

This report summarizes a series of Kaspersky Lab reports that between them provide an overview of how the financial threat landscape has evolved over the years. It covers the common phishing threats, along with Windows-based and Android-based financial malware.

Every year, vast numbers of people around the globe relish the delightful prospect of filling out tax returns, applying for tax refunds, etc. Given that tax authorities and their taxpayers are moving online, it’s no surprise to find cybercriminals hard on their heels.

The share of spam in email traffic in 2017 fell by 1.68% to 56.63%. The lowest share (52.67%) was recorded in December 2017. The highest (59.56%) belonged to September. In 2017, the Anti-Phishing system was triggered 246,231,645 times on computers of Kaspersky Lab users as a result of phishing redirection attempts.

It often happens that inventions and technologies that start out good end up turning into dangerous tools in the hands of criminals. Blockchain is no exception to this rule, especially in its most common cryptocurrency incarnation. The attacks targeted employees of small companies, but such emails could be sent to any user’s personal mail.

On Monday, Jan 29th, IRS officially opened its 2018 season. Right after two days of the opening, we got phishing messages with a fake refund status websites.

This time of year is an ideal hunting ground for hackers, phishers and malware spreaders; disguising their attacks as offers too good to refuse, a concerned security message from your bank requiring urgent attention, a special rate discount from your credit card service, and more.

Our growing dependence on technology, connectivity and data means that businesses present a bigger attack surface than ever. Targeted attackers have become more adept at exploiting their victims’ vulnerabilities to penetrate corporate defences while ‘flying under the radar’.

In terms of the average share of spam in global email traffic (58.02%), the third quarter of 2017 was almost identical to the previous reporting period: once again growth was slightly more than one percentage point – 1.05 (and 1.07 p.p. in Q2 2017). As in previous quarters, spammers were quick to react to high-profile events and adapted their fraudulent emails to the news agenda.

In Q2 2017, the average share of spam in global email traffic amounted to 56.97%, which was only 1.07 p.p. more than in the previous quarter. One of the most notable events of this quarter – the WannaCry epidemic – did not go unnoticed by spammers: numerous mass mailings contained offers of assistance in combating the ransomware.