Cyber-fraudsters involved in the creation and distribution of spam and phishing leveraged a host of topics including lucrative investments, online streaming of global movie or TV premieres and themes related to the ongoing pandemic to lure users in 2021, according to 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,” it said.
Cryptocurrency investment
Spam is a type of malicious activity that involves massive or targeted email distributions. The aim behind such schemes is for fraudsters 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,” it explained.
One of these topics was related to investments in cryptocurrencies or stocks. As part of such scams, users were offered potentially great, “100 per cent safe” opportunities to invest their money, which wasn’t true. In reality these offerings were solely…
