Researchers at Google and Stanford analyzed a 1.2 billion malicious emails to find out what makes users likely to get attacked. 2FA wasn’t a big factor.
Users whose personal details have been exposed by a third-party breach, Australians, older folks and those who use both desktops and mobile devices are at the highest risk of becoming the
victim of a malicious email attack, according to Google and researchers from Stanford, who teamed up to determine who has the highest risk of being targeted.
The researchers looked at the 1.2 billion
phishing and malware emails automatically blocked by Gmail over five months. For privacy, the team used something they called “k-anonymity” to look at broad trends across the data, rather than individual users.
“We modeled the likelihood of receiving any phishing or malware emails in a given week as a function of geographic location, demographics, security posture, device access and prior security incidents (such as having personal data revealed by a third-party data breach),” the report explained.
This research comes at a time when users are getting crushed by record numbers of malware-stuffed emails. COVID-19 and the pandemic’s push to a remote workforce have
supercharged email attckers’ efforts over the past year.
In fact, according to Proofpoint’s 2020 State of the Phish report, the pandemic has driven a 14 percent
increase in phishing attacks in the U.S. alone over 2019.
