Google announced last week that it blocked an average of more than 240 million daily Covid-19-related spam messages and 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to the virus and the disease.
Google reports in a blog post about the protections it offers with Gmail, that the webmail service blocks 100 million phishing emails every day, of which 18 million were related to Covid-19 last week. Gmail labeled an additional 240 million covid-19-related emails per day last week as spam.
According to Google, these usually involve existing campaigns that are simply updated by criminals to exploit awareness of the virus and disease. The company provides some examples of messages calling for donations to fight Covid-19 and tricking recipients into clicking links or opening attachments. Gmail’s machine learning models are said to be able to filter more than 99.9 percent of all spam, phishing and malware.
Security firms such as Barracuda and Mimecast have recently warned of an increase in COVID-19 and coronavirus-related phishing campaigns.