Security News > 2021 > February > Vast Majority of Phishing and Malware Campaigns Are Small-Scale and Short-Lived
Researchers from Google and Stanford University have analyzed the patterns of more than 1.2 billion email-based phishing and malware attacks targeting Gmail users, and found that most attack campaigns are short-lived and sent to fewer than 1,000 targets.
Users in North America are targeted the most, they found, with 42% of the observed attacks targeted users in the United States, 10% hitting people in the United Kingdom, and 5% aimed at users in Japan.
Most of the analyzed 406,002 phishing campaigns and 1,724,160 malware campaigns, the researchers say, were short, with fewer than 1000 users targeted by 91% of the phishing emails and 99% of the malware emails.
The majority of attacks were brief, with 89% of malware campaigns lasting just one day, and 80% of the phishing campaigns lasting less than a week.
"This short duration is likely a direct response to attackers attempting to re-configure campaigns to evade detection. Absent cycling to new campaigns, traffic to phishing pages has been found to disappear within a few hours after detection," the researchers explain in a newly published report.
While 83% of phishing and 97% of malware emails were written in English, attackers to employ localization in some cases: 78% of emails targeting users in Japan were written in Japanese, 66% of attacks aimed at Brazilian users occurred in Portuguese, 4% of the attacks targeting users in France were employed emails written in French.