Security News > 2021 > February > No phish for the likes of you, thank you very much! Google finds email villains are picky about demographics, country

Kind old Google has published data on targeted email attacks and dispensed advice to help users separate friend from foe.

The pandemic has presented malware-laden email flingers with a world of opportunity and a whole new set of attack vectors.

Google and researchers at Stanford University studied five months' worth of phishing and malware campaigns and concluded the US and the UK were the most popular targets.

The same English email template also tended to get used, although localisation was improving; 78 per cent of attacks in Japan were in Japanese, for example.

It being an emission from Google Cloud, the report recommended making use of Mountain View's phishing and malware protections.

No, it was not an actual email related to Tesco but we could not help but notice that the links led back to that stout slayer of spam: Google and its API. A Google spokesperson told The Register: "When an email is flagged for phishing, our priority is to keep our users safe. We look at many security signals, and malicious links is one of them, before taking appropriate action - one of which may be account suspension." .

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/02/10/google_phishing/