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Pre-holiday spam

Easy money

In the run-up to Christmas and New Year, scam е-mails mentioning easy pickings, lottery winnings, and other cash surprises are especially popular. All the more so given how simple it is to adapt existing schemes simply by mentioning the holiday in the subject line.

For example, one scam е-mail with the subject line “Xsmas gift” or “Xmas offer” talks about a “special donation” and provides a contact е-mail address for more information. Recipients who respond are lured into parting with a sum of money through social engineering.

Another Christmas-related scheme aims to steal cryptocurrency. Scammers offer the chance to earn some bitcoins before the holiday period using “secret” software that can be downloaded via a link.

After downloading and running the program (the malware Hoax.Win32.Agent.gen.), the user is prompted to enter their cryptowallet credentials and wait until the request is executed.

Next, the user is informed that the cryptocurrency will be credited to their account immediately after they pay a transfer fee. The result is predictable — the user earns no bitcoins, and the “fee” goes to the scammers.

Extortion

Standard extortion schemes are also adapted for the festive period. For instance, the authors of this е-mail threaten to spoil the victim’s Christmas by smearing them as a pedophile. To prevent this, the recipient needs to transfer the equivalent of $5,000 in bitcoin to the extorters.

Malicious mailings and the corporate sector

Corporate е-mail addresses are also on the cybercriminal radar. To extract confidential information from recipients, or install malware, scammers mask malicious е-mails as business correspondence. In the pre-holiday period, when sales are on the rise, retail finds itself in a special risk zone. E-mails with malicious attachments (DOC or XLS) are sent under the guise of messages related to orders for goods.

For example, hidden in the attachment to this е-mail is Trojan-Downloader.MSOffice.SLoad.sb, which in turn downloads other malware to the victim’s computer.

Malicious attachments can also be disguised as invoices and payment notices. The archive attached to this е-mail actually contains the Trojan-PSW.MSIL.Agensla.hdt stealer, which harvests logins and passwords, and then sends them to the cybercriminals.

Statistics

The share of spam as a percentage of world email traffic gradually increased throughout the entire Q4 2019 and in December amounted to 57.26%. Thus it almost reached the maximum value for the second half of the year — 57.78% (which we recorded in August).

A similar picture was observed in Russia. However, in the fall the growth was less pronounced:

From September to November the amount of spam traffic grew by a total of 0.86 percentage points (compared to a growth rate of 1.14 percentage points for the entire world) to reach 51.15% of total email volume. However, during the last month of the year, the share of spam jumped dramatically by 3.36 p.p. (compared to only 1.44% for the entire world) and exceeded even the summer indicators (54.51% in December as opposed to 53.5 % in July and 53.76% in August). Most likely, such a sharp rise can be attributed to the traditional uptick in holiday season activity by spammers.

In the Asia-Pacific region as a whole, we also observed an increase in the amount of spam in email traffic from September (50.19%) to December (52.62%). As you can see from the diagram, the increase is quite gradual. At the same time, the volume of junk messages reached a peak in January, when their share made 55.48%. This is most likely due to the lunar new year, which is celebrated in most of the countries of the region and which this year fell on January 25.
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