Gmail is blocking more than 18 million coronavirus tracking emails per day – Google claims
Google, in a recent statement, has disclosed that its highly popular email service, Gmail intercepts not less than 18 million fake email messages related to the coronavirus crisis each day, over the past week.
On a good day, Google claimed that Gmail blocks over 100 million phishing messages from getting to the user’s inbox, and the coronavirus phishing messages blocked represents close to 20% of it.
Gmail is the most widely used email service worldwide, both by individuals and businesses, with a user count of over 1.5 billion. These stats make it adorable for hackers, and it has subsequently become an abode for risky emails.
With more people working from home and staying connected to the internet, there is no other perfect time to launch attacks at an innocent populace.
Cybersecurity officials have sent warnings to all state-backed online criminals who have been using the coronavirus pandemic to their advantage. As more people use their device over insecure networks, these hackers could easily target and compromise online accounts.
The cyber-criminals are exploiting several ways to defraud and take advantage of Gmail users. They may pretend to be from legitimate health organizations, such as the World Health Organization, and ask users to support the fight against coronavirus by dropping a donation in Bitcoin.
Some other hackers impersonate workers from government agencies, guiding small businesses on applying for stimulus packages.
Google also disclosed in a recent blog post that most of the phishing threats and malicious activities by hackers in this pandemic aren’t new. They’re just modified to take advantage of the heightened attention on the pandemic.
However, Google’s intelligent machine learning algorithms are just enough to prevent these malicious email messages from reaching the end-users. To bypass Google’s algorithms, hackers sometimes change techniques, but Google is also ever responding.
Google detects and blocks 99.9% of all malicious emails, while the malicious documents blocked stands at a lower rate of 63%. However, Google has introduced new document scanners with enhanced malware detection capabilities for malware embedded in documents. These documents are based on the existing TensorFlow deep-learning algorithms.
These new technologies are expected to increase the accuracy of Gmail in detecting malware embedded in documents like PDFs and executable files.
This is part of Google’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Recent news has highlighted their attempt to create a coronavirus tracking app in conjunction with Apple.
