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According to Google, on average last week, 18 million COVID-19 phishing emails were sent per day via Gmail to unsuspecting brands.
“No matter the size of your business, IT teams face increased pressure to meet the challenges of COVID-19,” said Neil Kumaran, product manager for Gmail, and Sam Lugani, PMM security manager today. , G Suite and CP platform.
The pair said phishing is still the “most effective method” that scammers are deploying to compromise accounts and recover corporate data and resources. They added that the “bad actors” jumped on “the uncertainty surrounding the pandemic”.
Google said its malware scanner uses deep learning technology to detect malware on 300 billion attachments every week, and 63% of suspicious documents blocked by Gmail are different from day to day .
Kumaran and Lugani said Google is blocking 100 million daily phishing emails from reaching their targets and “in the past week, we have seen 18 million malware and daily phishing emails related to COVID-19”.
“This is in addition to over 240 million COVID-related spam messages per day. Our machine learning models have evolved to understand and filter these threats, and we continue to prevent over 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware from reaching our end. users, “they said.
It still means that 258,000 COVID-19 themed spam and phishing emails actually landed in users' inboxes every day. While Google captured the vast majority, there is still work to be done to minimize the more the risks.
On April 8, the wave of COVID-19 scams was reported by the United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Center and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) ( DHS).
In one joint council [PDF], NCSC said it had spotted more UK government scams related to the disease “than any other subject” and that switching to homework had increased the use of “potentially vulnerable services”.
The notice said that criminals were trying to use the weaknesses of VPNs, remote work tools and software to hit the mark: NCSC and CISA “observed actors scanning” known vulns in Citrix (CVE-2019-19781). One in five Citrix public boxes remained uncorrected in February and open to attack. Similar vulnerabilities of Pulse Secure, Fortinet and Palo Alto “continue to operate,” said the NCSC.
“Malicious cyber actors also seek to exploit the increased use of popular communication platforms (such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams) by sending phishing emails containing malicious files with names such as” zoom-us -zoom _ ######## ##. exe ‘and' microsoft-teams_V # mu # D _ ###########. exe ‘. “(It is said that the # represents the different figures reported online.)
Zoom itself has come under scrutiny for sound failures security and confidentiality – this last policy was rewrite – next to a influx of users of its videoconferencing service.
The German Foreign Ministry has banned its use, as has the Taiwanese government and the New York school system. The company has also misled users by claiming to provide end-to-end encryption denied by its ability to access data in transit along the conference call connection.
Router brand Linksys recently reset all passwords for customers' Smart Wi-Fi accounts when it became apparent that the attackers had managed to get their hands on a load and were redirecting unsuspecting users to malware related to COVID-19.
The advice provided by Google today includes basic common sense hygiene: perform a security check; don't download things you don't recognize; verify the integrity of URLs before providing login information or clicking on a link; avoid and report phishing emails; and, not surprisingly, consider signing up for Choc Factory's advanced protection program. ®
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