New research has revealed that just under half of all emails sent in 2021 were spam.

According to the Spam and Phishing Report in 2021 from Kaspersky, spam accounted for an average of 45.56% of emails sent during last year.

This peaked in July at 48.03% in June, with the low point coming in November, when 43.7% of emails were spam.

The most common country of origin was Russia, with 24.77% of spam email being sent from its territory. Russia held its place from 2020 and added an additional 3.5 percentage points.

Second highest was Germany, producing 14.12% of the world’s spam, which also saw a similar rise, 3.15 percentage points.

Other popular spam origins were the US and China, producing 10.46% and 8.73% respectively. The UK produced 1.66%.

The most frequently attached malware family were Agensla Trojans. These are designed to steal credentials stored in the victim’s browser, along with credentials from FTP clients and email clients.

While a common annoyance for most, spam is an integral part of most cyberattacks. It provides the vector for malware and is used to build trust in social engineering attacks.

Since most spam email campaigns are relatively simple, they are easy for cybercriminals to create and run. However, while they may not be technologically complex, they can be sophisticated enough to accurately mimic real and trusted services, the better to lure their victims.

As such, it is vital for all organisations to be vigilant against fraudulent emails.

Kaspersky found a number of popular topics used by fraudsters to lure in potential victims.

These include subjects related to cryptocurrencies or stocks, generally offering invest opportunities. Scammers frequently offer early access to stream new movies, piggybacking on the popularity of trending releases.

The pandemic was another major topic exploited by phishers in 2021, generally offering compensation from governments and health organisations or access to vaccination certificates.

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“Widely discussed topics such as money, movie premieres and worldwide happenings, like the pandemic, have always been ‘bread and butter’ for scammers,” said security expert at Kaspersky Tatyana Sherbakova.

“We keep seeing it return from year to year and it doesn’t look like criminals will stop anytime soon. This is mostly because these scams prove to be very efficient as people continue to trust too much of what they see in their inboxes and browsers.

“We believe it is important to be aware that there are a lot of offers out there that seem ‘too good to be true.’ We call on people to be cautious when it comes to trusting what’s in their email, as this approach may help them save their private data and money.”

Kaspersky’s experts provided advice on how to avoid falling for phishing emails.

Primary among them is only opening emails and clicking links on emails sent by trusted senders.

If the content in an email from a legitimate sender seems strange, people should check with them using an alternative communication channel.

In addition, hackers typically misspell URLs – checking to make sure these are spelled correctly is a good technique to spot a phishing attempt. However, these may be hard to spot – a 1 instead of I or 0 instead of O.

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