According to her report Kaspersky Lab on its landscape spam and phishing threats for the first quarter of 2015, the new series of top level domain, presented in January of 2015 and intended for use by relevant communities and organizations, has proven to be irresistible for spammers.
For many news domain are an excellent tool for promoting unwanted or illegal advertising campaigns.
Key statistics for spam and Phishing
- According to the first quarter of 2015, spam corresponded to 59.2% of the total volume of emails, the specific size being 6 percentage points lower than in the previous quarter.
- The US is still the biggest source messages spam, with 14,5% of all spam being sent from this country.
- Its products Kaspersky Lab recorded 50.077.057 cases where the Antiphishing system was activated (1 million more compared to the previous quarter).
- Phishing attacks against customers of financial institutions accounted for 37,06% of all recorded incidents.
Scams with the news domain
The new program enrollmentς των generic top-level domain (gTLD) δίνει σε οργανισμούς τη δυνατότητα να επιλέξουν μια ζώνη domain, η οποία θα είναι συνεπής με τις δραστηριότητές και το theme of their websites.
For example, job placement sites can now use a domain with the ".work" suffix, scientific sites ending ".science", etc.
The Internet community has enthusiastically welcomed the business opportunities provided by the new gTLD program and the active registration of new domain names is under way.
However, spammers and digital criminals have also responded quickly to this trend. So, the new domain bands were almost immediately the arena for large-scale distribution of spam, phishing, and other malicious emails.
According to Kaspersky Lab's comments on email traffic, there has been a significant increase in the number of new domains that spammed in the first quarter of 2015.
Email sent from ".work" domains generally contained bids for the provision of various types of work in areas such as home maintenance, construction, and equipment installation, among others. On the other hand, many of the messages from ".science" domains were advertisements for schools offering distance learning, as well as educational institutions targeted at nurses, criminologists and other professionals.
Also, in the first quarter, many emails sent from a domain that came with a color such as ".pink", ".red", or ".black" appeared. These are often used to advertise Asian dating sites.
"Observing the first quarter overall and the type of spam messages in the news domain, insurance services were one of the hottest issues in terms of the number of messages and the number of domain in bulk shipments. This covers all types of insurance – life, healths, assets, car, etc."Said Tatyana Shcherbakova, Kaspersky Lab's Senior Spam Analyst.
More information about the spam and phishing landscape in the first quarter of 2015 is available on the Kaspersky Lab website Securelist.com.
