The software tech giant Google on Friday revealed that in the past one week it has blocked more than 18 million malware as well as phishing emails all related to COVID-19. According to the company, these phishing attacks generally try to trick the users while exposing their personal data.
The company in its blog post said that phishing is one of the most effective methods that attackers use to compromise accounts and gain access to company data and resources. The bad actors are creating new attacks and scams every day that attempt to take advantage of the fear and uncertainty surrounding the pandemic.
Gmail every day blocks more than 100 million phishing emails. But in the last week, it identified 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19. In addition to this more than 240 million COVID-related daily spam messages.
The software giant said these phishing attacks and scams make use of both fear and financial incentives to create urgency to try to prompt users to respond. The company also provided examples to prove their point. These emails do an impression of authoritative government organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) seeking fraudulent donations or distributing malware such as downloadable files that can install backdoors. Also, it presented examples showing increased phishing attempts of employees operating in a work-from-home setting, imitating government institutions to phish small businesses.
Addressing the security and privacy issue the company has put proactive monitoring in place for COVID-19-related malware and phishing across our systems and workflows.
“As soon as we identify a threat, we add it to the Safe Browsing API, which protects users in Chrome, Gmail, and all other integrated products. Safe Browsing helps protect over four billion devices every day by showing warnings to users when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files. In G Suite, advanced phishing and malware controls are turned on by default, ensuring that all G Suite users automatically have these proactive protections in place,” the company said.
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