Spam and phishing in 2020

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Figures of the year

In 2020:

• The share of spam in email traffic amounted to 50.37%, down by 6.14 p.p. from 2019.
  
• Most spam (21.27%) originated in Russia.
  
• Kaspersky solutions detected a total of 184,435,643 malicious attachments.
  
• The email antivirus was triggered most frequently by email messages containing members of the Trojan.Win32.Agentb malware family.
  
• The Kaspersky Anti-Phishing component blocked 434,898,635 attempts at accessing scam sites.
  
• The most frequent targets of phishing attacks were online stores (18.12 per cent).
  

Trends of the yearContact us to lose your money or account!

In their email campaigns, scammers who imitated major companies, such as Amazon, PayPal, Microsoft, etc., increasingly tried to get users to contact them. Various pretexts were given for requesting the user to get in touch with “support”: order confirmation, resolving technical issues, cancellation of a suspicious transaction, etc. All of these messages had one thing in common: the user was requested to call a support number stated in the email. Most legitimate messages give recipients constant warnings of the dangers of opening links that arrive by email. An offer to call back was supposed to put the addressees off their guard. Toll-free numbers were intended to add further credibility, as the support services of large companies often use these. The scammers likely expected their targets to use the provided phone number to get help instantly in a critical situation, rather than to look for a contact number or wait for a written response from support.

The contact phone trick was heavily used both in email messages and on phishing pages. The scammers were simply betting on the visitor to turn their attention to the number and unsettling warning message against the red background, rather than the address bar of the fake website.We assume that those who called the numbers were asked to provide the login and password for the service that the scammers were imitating, or to pay for some diagnostics and troubleshooting services.

Reputation, bitcoins or your life?

In 2020, Bitcoin blackmailers stuck to their old scheme, demanding that their victims transfer money to a certain account and threatening adversity for failure to meet their demands. Threats made by extortionists grew in diversity. In most cases, scammers, as before, claimed to have used spyware to film the blackmail victim watching adult videos. In a reflection of the current trends for online videoconferencing, some email campaigns claimed to have spied on their victims with the help of Zoom. This year, too, blackmailers began to take advantage of news sensations to add substance to their threats. This is very similar to the techniques of “Nigerian” scammers, who pose as real political figures or their relatives, offering tons of money, or otherwise link their messages with concurrent global events. In the case of bitcoin blackmail, the media component was supposed to be a strong argument in the eyes of the victim for paying the ransom without delay, so cybercriminals cited the example of media personalities whose reputation suffered because of an explicit video being published.
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