Technology
Google to Protect Users by Blocking Coronavirus-Related Scam Messages
Google has blocked millions of daily malicious emails about the novel coronavirus from reaching Gmail users.
“It’s our job to constantly stay ahead of these threats to help you protect your organization,” wrote the company in a blog post. The post assured that Gmail blocks more than 100 million phishing emails every day.
“During the last week, we saw 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19,” said the post. “This is in addition to more than 240 million COVID-related daily spam messages. Our ML models have evolved to understand and filter these threats,” Google went on to say. “We continue to block more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching our users,” the company added.
Protecting businesses against cyber threats during COVID-19 and beyondhttps://t.co/1TKr3s1HrB#cloud #gcp #cloudmigration #GoogleCloudPlatform #CloudStorage #cloudsecurity pic.twitter.com/VxDh1ZP8gq
— briotech (@briotech) April 20, 2020
The scams they are seeing use “both fear and financial incentives to create urgency to try to prompt users to respond,” the company said. One example it gave was impersonating authoritative government organizations. Such organizations as the World Health Organization (WHO) to solicit donations or distribute malware.
Google has put “proactive monitoring in place for COVID-19-related malware and phishing across our systems and workflows.”
“As soon as we identify a threat, we add it to the Safe Browsing API, which protects users in Chrome, Gmail, and all other integrated products. Safe Browsing helps protect over four billion devices every day by showing warnings to users when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files,” the company explains.
The company concluded the post with a list of best practices for organizations and users. These include completing a security checkup and checking the integrity of URLs.
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