18 February 2022: During 2021, cyber-fraudsters involved in the creation and distribution of spam and phishing tried to lure users using topics focused on lucrative investments, online streaming of global movie or TV premieres and themes related to restrictions, requirements and benefits of the ongoing pandemic. These are the key outcomes of Kaspersky’s Annual Spam and Phishing Report.
While not being too complex technology-wise, spam and phishing attacks are often based on sophisticated social engineering techniques. That is why such attacks are considered quite dangerous for an unprepared user. Spam is a type of malicious activity that involves massive or targeted email disrtibutions. The goal of the fraudsters behind these schemes is to promote various products and services among internet users and to lure targets to either engage in a dialogue, click a malicious link or open a malicious file attachment. Phishing often takes the form of a spam email paired with a malicious copy of a legitimate website. These copies collect private user data or encourage the transfer of money to fraudsters. As the results of the Kaspersky Spam and Phishing in 2021 report shows, last year cybercriminals used many popular topics to scam users.
Investments in cryptocurrencies or stocks was one such topic – in these scams users were offered potentially great, “100% safe” opportunities to invest their money, which of course wasn’t true. In reality these…
