- Apr 21, 2016
- 4,373
In a rather worrying new report coming from Kaspersky Lab it was revealed that in last year's fourth quarter, about a fifth of all spam emails carried ransomware with them.
While this is reason enough for everyone to worry and triple check any incoming email, it's not exactly a surprise given the skyrocketing popularity of ransomware among hackers.
According to Kaspersky's Spam and phishing in 2016 report, the volume of spam emails in 2016 rose to over 58% of overall email traffic, which is over 3% more than in 2015. As per usual, the US remained the biggest source of spam with 12% of it coming from computers across the 50 states. Second place is occupied by Vietnam, with 10.3%, while the third spot goes to India with 10.15%.
When it comes to the countries that are most targeted by malicious emails, Germany takes the lead with little over 14%. The second spot goes to Japan with nearly 7.6% and China with 7.3%.
As mentioned before, phishing attacks, in particular ransomware infections have grown quite a bit in the financial sector and across other businesses, places where attackers could make a little bit more money. Kaspersky notes that in 2016, the average proportion of phishing attacks against customers of financial institutions was over 47%, up from the 34% of the previous year.
"In 2016, fraudulent spam exploited the theme of major sporting events: the European Football Championship, the Olympic Games in Brazil, as well as the upcoming World Cups in 2018 and 2022. Typically, spammers send out fake notifications of lottery wins linked to one of these events. The content of the fake messages wasn’t exactly very original: the lottery was supposedly held by an official organization and the recipient’s address was randomly selected from millions of other addresses. To get their prize, the recipient had to reply to the email and provide some personal information," the report reads, indicating just some of the techniques used by attackers.
Read more: A Fifth of Spam Emails Sent in 2016 Distributed Ransomware
While this is reason enough for everyone to worry and triple check any incoming email, it's not exactly a surprise given the skyrocketing popularity of ransomware among hackers.
According to Kaspersky's Spam and phishing in 2016 report, the volume of spam emails in 2016 rose to over 58% of overall email traffic, which is over 3% more than in 2015. As per usual, the US remained the biggest source of spam with 12% of it coming from computers across the 50 states. Second place is occupied by Vietnam, with 10.3%, while the third spot goes to India with 10.15%.
When it comes to the countries that are most targeted by malicious emails, Germany takes the lead with little over 14%. The second spot goes to Japan with nearly 7.6% and China with 7.3%.
As mentioned before, phishing attacks, in particular ransomware infections have grown quite a bit in the financial sector and across other businesses, places where attackers could make a little bit more money. Kaspersky notes that in 2016, the average proportion of phishing attacks against customers of financial institutions was over 47%, up from the 34% of the previous year.
"In 2016, fraudulent spam exploited the theme of major sporting events: the European Football Championship, the Olympic Games in Brazil, as well as the upcoming World Cups in 2018 and 2022. Typically, spammers send out fake notifications of lottery wins linked to one of these events. The content of the fake messages wasn’t exactly very original: the lottery was supposedly held by an official organization and the recipient’s address was randomly selected from millions of other addresses. To get their prize, the recipient had to reply to the email and provide some personal information," the report reads, indicating just some of the techniques used by attackers.
Read more: A Fifth of Spam Emails Sent in 2016 Distributed Ransomware
