Kaspersky says nearly 60% of email traffic was spam

Feb 22, 2017 11:23 GMT  ·  By

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.

Another topic exploited in spam mailings was terrorism. Numerous Nigerian letters were sent to users on behalf of state organization employees and individuals, detailing various stories. The purpose was always the same, however, promising large sums of money to make them join the conversation.

Most popular ransomware

The most popular were mass spam mailings sent out to infect user computers with the Locky encryptor, but other ransomware such as Petya, Cryakl and Shade were also quite widespread. In total, in 2016, the anti-phishing system on computers running Kaspersky Lab was triggered nearly 240 million times, four times more frequently than the year before.

This whole report is just a great reminder to never click on emails from people you don't know, and even when we receive emails from someone you do know to be wary of downloading any files unless you can confirm the sender is who they say they are and it's not a spoofed address instead.