Spam and Phishing

At Kaspersky Lab, machine learning can be found in a number of different areas, especially when dealing with the interesting task of spam detection. This particular task is in fact much more challenging than it appears to be at first glance.

Last November we conducted a brief analysis of the threat landscape over the holiday period – from October to December in 2014 and 2015. And we made the following prognosis: the same holiday period in 2016 will see a spike in cyberattacks. Now that the holidays are over, it is time to find out how accurate that prediction was.

Our research shows that, over the last few years, the holiday period which starts on so-called Black Friday was marked by an increase in phishing and other types of attacks, which suggests that the pattern will be repeated this year.

In the third quarter of 2016, the proportion of spam in email traffic increased by 2 p.p. compared to the previous quarter and accounted for 59.19%. The largest percentage of spam – 61.25% – was registered in September.

Trojan-Ransom.AndroidOS.Fusob.h remained the most popular mobile Trojan-Ransomware in the third quarter, accounting for nearly 53% of users attacked by mobile ransomware.

In April of this year, we registered some mass attacks on Facebook users in Russia. As a result, many Russian-speaking users of the social network fell victim to fraudsters. Half a year later the fraudsters have used the same tactics to attack Facebook users in Europe.

The telecoms sector is under fire on all sides – hit by direct attacks on organizations and networks, indirect attacks in search of subscribers, and collateral damage from unrelated, targeted campaigns. This report reveals the many layers of vulnerability.

In the second quarter of 2016, the proportion of spam in email traffic increased insignificantly – by 0.33 p.p. – compared to the previous quarter and accounted for 57.25%. The US remained the biggest source of spam. As in the previous quarter, the top three sources also included Vietnam and India.

In the second quarter of 2016, Kaspersky Lab’s web antivirus detected 16,119,489 unique malicious objects: scripts, exploits, executable files, etc. 54,539,948 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by web antivirus components.

Bankers and encryptors, ransomware and spyware, old and new exploits; APT attacks, ATM infection, spear phishing and fraud targeting large numbers of users – cybercriminals continue their hunt for money and information

Brazilian cybercriminals are clearly setting their sights on users of mobile banking. They are using SMiShing (phishing via SMS) and registering new mobile phish domains created especially for this purpose.

Recently we revealed that a threat actors exploited social networks to spread a Trojan that captures a victim’s entire browser traffic. Approximately 10,000 Facebook users with Windows PCs were hit by malicious friend notifications. In this article we will explain the security issue and attack.

Whilst sitting and working in the South African office I receive an email from my Swedish ISP. I quickly look at it and there is something that doesn’t add up. The email states that I need to pay my invoice, but I never receive electronic invoices from this company.

A malware attack tricked around 10,000 Facebook users around the world. Compromised PCs were used to hijack Facebook accounts in order to spread the infection through the victim’s Facebook friends and for other malicious activity.

In this blog post we discuss the threats to visitors aiming to travel to Brazil to watch the Olympic Games and to those planning to watch it online. We’ll talk about phishing attacks, highlight WiFi security and touch upon physical security that involves the usage of USB charging spots, the problem of credit card cloning and ATM skimmers.