Google sees surge in Covid-19 related phishing, malware emails in the past week

Google on Thursday said that the company saw more than 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to Covid-19 in the past week on its platform.

Google, in a blog post elated to cyber threats amid Covid-19 said that the company has seen a massive surge in phishing attacks and spam emails pertaining to the pandemic. It further detailed its attempts to block the same.

“Every day, Gmail blocks more than 100 million phishing emails. During the last week, we saw 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to Covid-19,” read the post.

“This is in addition to more than 240 million Covid-related daily spam messages,” it further said.

Filtering phishing, spam mails

The tech giant said that it has been able to detect and filter these threats out, blocking almost 99.9 per cent of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching Google users.

Most of these emails are from miscreants impersonating authoritative government organizations like the World Health Organisation (WHO). These emails are sent under the guise of authority to collect funds or spread malware as the user clicks on links that are sent as “important information.”

These are meant to “solicit fraudulent donations or distribute malware. This includes mechanisms to distribute downloadable files that can install backdoors,” Google said.

Some emails are sent as important information from authorities for employees that are working from home while others attempt to capitalize on government stimulus packages and imitate government institutions to phish small businesses, according to the the tech giant.

Google said that it was working with the WHO to “clarify the importance of an accelerated implementation of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance)” and authenticate emails to further improve security.

“DMARC makes it harder for bad actors to impersonate the who.int domain, thereby preventing malicious emails from reaching the recipient’s inbox, while making sure legitimate communication gets through,” it said.

Google adds all newly detected threats to its Safe Browsing API to prevent future attacks. Advanced phishing and malware controls are switched on by default for Google’s commercial solutions i.e. its GSuite users.

The search giant further recommended some basic steps that users can take to prevent such phishing and malware attacks including conducting regular safety checkups, not downloading suspicious files, and confirming the legitimacy of URLs before clicking.

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