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If only it was annoying, like wasps on a bee sting, you could live with it. Casually wave the mouse and you have deleted the stupid spam emails. But the unsolicited electronic mail can also be tough. Scares you with reminders, pretends to be instructions from the boss or lures you with sweet promises to dubious websites with a clear goal: rip-off or identity theft.
Google is one of the biggest mail providers with its Gmail offering and does a pretty good job of sorting out the e-junk. Only 0.1 percent of this gets through to the users. But that’s still enough to cause damage. Now the internet company has scanned more than a billion emails with artificial intelligence to find out who is actually getting the most dangerous spam emails. According to Google’s definition, messages are dangerous if they contain software code with malicious intent, either to steal important data (phishing) or to attack the computer (malware).
Older Gmail customers are more likely to get spam than younger ones
In terms of volume, the United States is at the forefront of phishing, followed by Japan and India. The US also leads in malware attacks via email, followed by the UK and Australia. Germany is not among the ten most affected countries. Most spam senders don’t bother to translate their emails, but use an English version. In Japan or Brazil, however, spam in the national language clearly predominates.
Particularly perfidious: Users who have already been attacked and whose data such as age and e-mail address are on relevant lists are particularly often attacked. Gmail customers between the ages of 55 and 64 are more likely to receive spam than younger customers – presumably because spammers assume that this age group will respond more to their emails.
Because there is a constant cat and mouse game between the e-mail providers who want to filter out unwanted mail and the spammers, the spam campaigns usually only have a short life of around three days. In order not to end up on the radar of the spam filter, the senders only send around 100 to 1000 identical emails.
And how do you fight back against the post-plague? With healthy mistrust. When in doubt, don’t click, ask.
