An increase was recorded in the first quarter of 2014 in malicious spam, especially in popular smartphone applications, such as WhatsApp, Viber and Google Hangouts, through notifications that appear and appear to belong to the application, imitating messages.
Frequent "phishing" attacks, carried out on the most popular mobile devices, have the primary goal of stealing personal data, while the most common attack concerns the breach of Apple ID passwords.
According to techgear, few people would suspect, for example, that WhatsApp is not directly connected to an email service, an omission that could cost the user if they opened the Backdoor.Win32.Androm.bjkd attachment, which extracts all personal information.
The origin of such malicious programs comes mainly from China, with the U.S. and South Korea following on the list and also "hitting" the U.S. in the largest percentage. The most popular targets for phishing are email accounts and search engines with a percentage of 36.6%, while in second and third place are social media with 26% and financial institutions, banks and electronic transactions with 14.7% respectively.
The main goal of malicious emails is to steal confidential data, while most of them are now multifunctional, since they can install other malicious programs without the user knowing it. It is noteworthy, however, that spam emails sent accounted for 66.34% of total emails during the first quarter of 2014.
"For their protection, users should remember not to open emails from unknown senders and especially not to click on any links contained in these emails, as they inevitably put their security at risk. By clicking on unsafe links, users threaten their security, regardless of the device they use – be it desktop or mobile," notes the Head of Content Research and Analysis at Kaspersky Lab.
A detailed report on spams distributed during the first quarter of 2014 is available at securelist.com, while users can find real-time threat information via Kaspersky Lab's online map, by clicking here.
