Google on Wednesday revealed that it has detected 18 million malware and phishing Gmail messages per day related to COVID19, in addition to more than 240 million COVID-related d aily spam messages.
Google’s Threat AnalysisGroup (TAG) identified over a dozen government-backed attacker groups usingCOVID19 themes as lure for phishing and malware attempts — trying to get theirtargets to click malicious links and download files.
“Our machine learning models have evolved to understand andfilter these threats, and we continue to block more than 99.9 percent of spam,phishing and malware from reaching our users,” said Shane Huntley from ThreatAnalysis Group.
The TAG team also found new, COVID19-specific targeting ofinternational health organizations, including activity that corroboratesreporting in Reuters earlier this month and is consistent with the threat actorgroup often referred to as Charming Kitten.
“We’re proactively adding extra security protections, suchas higher thresholds for Google Account sign in and recovery, to more than50,000 of such high-risk accounts,” said Google.
Once people clicked on the emails, they were presented with phishing pages designed to trick them into providing their Google account credentials.