These factors increase your risk of falling victim to email scams

February 9th, 2021, 3:49 pm

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For “Safer Internet Day 2021”, Google was concerned with identifying patterns that could make email users a preferred victim of malicious email campaigns.

In cooperation with researchers from Stanford University, Google searched a database of over a billion phishing and malware e-mails for patterns. One of the goals was to identify common features that reveal whether a target has become a target for a specific reason. In the aftermath, strategies could be developed to counteract this.

Demographic and socioeconomic factors influence the risk of email attacks

In fact, the research group succeeded in identifying various similarities and factors that can increase or decrease the likelihood of attack. It starts with the origin of the attack victims. 42 percent of all attacks were directed against e-mail recipients in the USA, followed by Great Britain with ten and Japan with five percent of all cases. The researchers found that attackers rarely bother to localize their emails. Instead, one and the same template is used via a common language base. English-speaking users are the preferred destinations simply because of their sheer number.

Otherwise, the attackers do not show this kind of laziness. Rather, they rely on rapidly changing campaigns of short duration. They only try to achieve success with an identical template for one to three days, whereby only small groups between 100 and 1,000 recipients are contacted at the same time. However, these limited campaigns result in more than 100 million phishing and malware emails per week at Gmail alone.

Once a data leak has occurred, it is always a potential victim

Aside from the center of life of the attack victims, the researchers were able to identify other risk factors that made an attack much more likely. For example, users whose addresses had already been traded in one of the countless data leaks were written to with five times the probability of an average user. Among the English-speaking users, Australians were found to be twice as vulnerable as Americans.

Age also turned out to be an increasing risk. For example, people between the ages of 55 and 64 were almost twice as likely to be victims of a malware campaign as those in the age group of 18 to 24. Another observation may play a role here: the researchers found that people who use e-mail are exclusively mobile have a 20 percent lower risk of attack than those who access e-mail on multiple devices.

As a result, it becomes clear that attackers do not act completely indiscriminately, but that specific targeting does not take place either – at least not usually. Google recommends Gmail users regularly Security checkups and generally careful handling of the medium itself.

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