Thanksgiving week may be one of the biggest shopping periods of the year. But it is also one of the busiest periods for scam emails, judging by last year’s activity, according to
Valimail.
The number of emails that failed authentication jumped to 4 times their normal volume on Tuesday, November 21, 2017.
That number jumped to 7X times the norm on Thanksgiving
Day, to 4X on Black Friday and to 12X on Saturday.
In addition, more than half of all messages handled by Valimail for clients on those days failed authentication, versus a usual 5%
baseline.
The phishing rate returned to normal after Saturday. And there was a mere single-digit increase on Cyber Monday.
After that, the flood stopped and the rate of
unauthenticated email returned to its normal levels.
The fake email surge mostly consisted of malicious impersonation attempts.
Most of the fake messages were “rejected or
quarantined based on the domain owner’s policy,” Valimail writes.