The fight for the freedom of Ukraine is also being waged on the Internet. The independent institute AV-TEST has registered a sharp increase in spam mails with phishing on its real-time portal AV-ATLAS. In one day, the increase was even 500 percent.
Even before the attack, the number of dangerous URLs had increased at an unusual rate (Image: AV-TEST).
“One day before the Russians invaded Ukraine, we registered a massive increase in spam emails. Two days earlier there was a significant increase in cyber attacks. Instead of a few tens of thousands of attempts, we registered hundreds of thousands for a short time,” says Maik Morgenstern, CEO of the cyber security institute AV-TEST.
Lots of spam emails with phishing attachments
A 500 percent increase in spam mails in one day (Image: AV-TEST).
On February 23.02.2022, 2.500, the AV-ATLAS portal registered an extreme increase in spam mails with phishing attachments. The real-time portal recently registered an average of around 15.000 variants of spam mails with various dangerous attachments. On the day mentioned, the number of spam emails of various types rose dramatically to over 500. That's an increase of 13.000 percent. The most common file attachment was classified as phishing: over XNUMX copies. The AV-ATLAS.org portal is accessible to anyone who wants to find out about the current threat situation. A brief explanation of what else is behind the portal.
AV-ATLAS – Real-time data source
There was an extremely large number of phishing emails on that day (Image: AV-TEST).
In the last 15 years, the AV-TEST laboratory has developed a large number of data sources and evaluates them itself. This is also necessary, because an independent testing institute could not rely on data from manufacturers whose products it then tests. Therefore, the AV-TEST laboratory uses many of its own honeypots, servers, mail accounts, websites or other data traps as a lure for cyber gangsters, collects infected mails, data, scripts and much more there and examines everything in analysis machines developed in-house. This permanent data stream is then logically divided into smaller streams, which provide the data basis of AV-ATLAS. So that this vast amount of data does not make the platform unusable, it always displays a data collection from the last 14 days. After all, AV-ATLAS shows current data and does not necessarily want to be considered an archive of the last few years that can be evaluated. However, such a retrospective analysis is possible for customers who subscribe to access entire analysis channels and evaluate them over the long term.
More at AV-ATLAS.org
About AV-TEST AV-TEST GmbH is an independent provider of services in the field of IT security and anti-virus research with a focus on the identification and analysis of the latest malware and its use in comprehensive comparative tests. The fact that the test data is up-to-date enables the quick-response analysis of new malware, the early detection of virus trends, and the investigation and certification of IT security solutions. The results of the AV-TEST Institute represent an exclusive information base and serve manufacturers for product optimization, specialist magazines for the publication of results and end customers for orientation in product selection.
The company AV-TEST has been operating in Magdeburg since 2004 and employs more than 30 people with profound specialist and practical experience. The laboratories are equipped with 300 client and server systems in which more than 2.500 terabytes of self-determined test data of harmful and harmless information are stored and processed. Further information can be found at https://www.av-test.org.