Taking a Gander at Threats Inside Malicious Emails

Up-to-the-minute stats

• In the first half of 2020, Group-IB found that 43% of malicious emails had spyware as attachments or links that led to their download.
• Backdoors and banking trojans accounted for 16% and 15% of the malicious payloads, respectively.
• Ransomware had a share of less than 1% among the malicious emails.

Notable attacks pertinent to the above stats

• The Transparent Tribe APT group was found deploying new Android spyware for cyberespionage purposes.
• After an interlude of several months, the Zeppelin ransomware came back to the arena. It came with a new trojan downloader and has been targeting the healthcare and technology sectors.
• A creative phishing campaign has popped up that leverages an email template pretending to be a reminder to finish a security awareness training from a renowned security organization.

Cyberthreat chronicles

• Online services were the primary target of web-phishers. The ecommerce sector is especially lucrative as cybercriminals can steal user credentials to gain access to victims’ payment information.
• After online services came email service providers and financial organizations. The chief web-phishing target categories include cloud storages, payment info, dating websites, and social networking sites.
• As per experts, the desire for more profits are likely to result in the surge of targeted ransomware attacks.

The takeaway