For a fourth year, programs designed to steal users logins, passwords and other confidential data remain on top of the list of the most widespread malware distributed by email, according to an IT security product firm. Kaspersky Lab summarised spammer activity for 2014:
· The proportion of spam in email flows was 66.8 per cent in 2014, which is 2.8 percentage points lower than the previous year.
· The reduced level of spam emails is explained by the fact that the advertising of legal goods and services is migrating to new and more effective advertising platforms.
· The largest proportion of malicious emails (9.8 per cent) targeted users in the USA. The UK was in second place (9.6 per cent) followed by Germany (9.2 per cent)
· The biggest source of spam was the USA (16.7 per cent)
· 42.6 per cent of phishing attacks targeted global portals that integrate many services accessed via a single account.
· Users in Russia faced the highest proportion of all phishing attacks – 17.28 per cent of the total number of attacks worldwide
· The country with the highest proportion of users targeted by phishers, meanwhile, was Brazil, where 27.5 per cent of all Kaspersky Lab users in the country faced an attack. Australia was second with 23.8 per cent, India and France were close behind on 23 per cent each.
· The Top three organisations whose brand identities were most often used in phishing attacks were Yahoo! with 23.3 per cent, Facebook with 10 per cent and Google with 8.7 per cent of the attacks.
Mobile spam
Spam mailings imitating emails sent from mobile devices are becoming very popular. Such emails are being distributed in several languages and mention a variety of devices, including iPad, iPhone, Samsung Galaxy and other models. These messages had one thing in common – very short (or non-existent) text and a signature reading “Sent from my iPhone”. Typically, they contain links to malicious attachments.
Generally spam mass mailings imitate notifications from different mobile applications such as WhatsApp and Viber. Users are familiar with the synchronisation of cross-platform apps and the fact that contact data and notifications are often shared between apps. As a result many mobile device owners don’t think twice about opening an email saying that something has arrived on their mobile messenger. But this is a mistake: these mobile applications are not connected to the user’s email account, which proves that such emails are obviously fake.
Maria Vergelis, Spam Analyst at Kaspersky Lab, said: “Fake bank notifications are among the most common types of malicious spam or phishing attacks. Recently, we have seen noticeable changes in the structure of some phishing emails. In 2014, spammers began to complicate the design of fake messages by adding more links to official resources and services of the organisations from which they claim to be sending their bogus notifications. Obviously, the attackers hope that an email with a few legitimate links would be recognised as legitimate by users and spam filters alike. Meanwhile, the email contains a single fraudulent link that either redirects users to a phishing site or downloads a malicious archive.”
Where’s the spam coming from?
The three countries that produced the majority of spam mass mailings comprised the USA (16.7 per cent), Russia (5.9 per cent) and China (5.5 per cent). To learn more about spam in 2014 read the blog post available at Securelist.com.
