Gmail blocks 18 million coronavirus malware and phishing attacks every day

[Antus67]

Content source

https://www.itproportal.com/news/gmail-blocks-18-million-coronavirus-malware-and-phishing-attacks-every-day/

Gmail currently blocks millions of coronavirus-themed phishing emails every day, according to a new blog post.

Authored by Gmail security leads Neil Kumaran and Sam Lugani, the post explains the service blocked 18 million malware and phishing emails relating to the virus outbreak each day of last week, plus an additional 240 million spam messages.



According to Kumaran and Lugani, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is the most frequently impersonated institution as part of these attacks. Cybercriminals use the WHO name and branding to trick victims into downloading malicious email attachments that resemble legitimate documents, which then infect the target device with malware.

Besides teaching its machine learning (ML) software to spot dangerous emails, Google also said it worked with the WHO “to clarify the importance of an accelerated implementation of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)," which makes impersonating the who.int domain more challenging.

Overall, Gmail blocks more than 99.9 per cent of spam, phishing and malware, with total daily phishing attacks coming in at 100 million.

 

[Ink]

Source:

Protecting against cyber threats during COVID-19 and beyond | Google Cloud Blog

COVID-19-related phishing and malware threats and steps to effectively deal with them

cloud.google.com

As soon as we identify a threat, we add it to the Safe Browsing API, which protects users in Chrome, Gmail, and all other integrated products. Safe Browsing helps protect over four billion devices every day by showing warnings to users when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files.

In G Suite, advanced phishing and malware controls are turned on by default, ensuring that all G Suite users automatically have these proactive protections in place.