Researchers at CSIRO's Data61 conducted a study and found that 60% of spam activity from 2007 to 2017 originated from three countries: the US, Russia, and Ukraine.
Their report, FinalBlacklist [PDF], includes 51.6 million reports of malicious activity and 662,000 unique IP addresses worldwide.
Data61 researchers preferred to categorize the malicious activities they examined. To do this, they used machine learning techniques. Ultimately, they created 6 categories: malware phishing, ,, exploits, potentially unwanted programs, fraudulent services and spam.
Dali Kaafar, head of research at CSIRO Data61 and Optus Macquarie University's Cyber Security Hub, said their research is the first published report of its kind.
"We realized that there was no open and publicly available data that would help us understand the trends and patterns associated with these cyberattacks that occur on a daily basis," said Kaafar.
He explained that there are various reports here and there from private companies, but until now, there was no data on spam activities that researchers, policymakers, or data scientists. This has resulted in many questions remaining unanswered.
The researchers wanted to discover and understand today 's cyber threats and how they affect users around the world. For this reason, they designed their own methodology and platform to collect the data they needed.
“Malicious activity has been increasing steadily over the past decade,” the researchers said. The number of reports of breaches and attacks on a daily basis has increased significantly. In fact, there can be a million reports in a single day.
As for phishing attacks, they started to become more common after 2009, when most smartphones started to appear . In 2017, 30% of attacks were phishing .
The researchers believe their report will advance research and help predict future threats.
