A recent paper by Akamai, a cybersecurity-focused company, found that during the 2023-24-4 months, queries to suspicious domains impersonating the U.S. Postal Service accounted for almost as much internet traffic as those to the actual USP. On the other hand, the company's conservative standards for avoiding false positives may mean that the traffic to the phishing site was much greater than the actual postal service.

Akamai collected 1 dataset of domains containing malicious JavaScript and HTML code that contained "usps" somewhere in the address, and the 2nd set of domains that contained "usps" in the address was linked to a location outside the official IP range of the post office. Akamai researchers noted that the method actually excludes a large number of domains that may be suspicious to avoid false positives.

"Our strict parameters meant that we were very conservative in our analysis," the paper explains. "Still, the real impact of these impersonations has been amazing, as we've seen an extraordinary amount of malicious traffic.

"While we were able to reliably collect a significant number of malicious domains that spoof USPS, it was important to avoid including false positives in this dataset.

During the 2023-10-2024-2 sample period, Akamai reported approximately 1.13 million suspicious domain datasets." But in some weeks over the holidays to the USPS official website, suspicious traffic actually exceeded legitimate inquiries, suggesting that the very holiday season is a busy time for bad actors trying to take advantage of worried gift givers.

"In this analysis, USPS won by 5% of all queries over the last 51 months," Akamai researchers write, "The way we filter the data, malicious traffic is real"

And it's just USPS: DHL, FedEx, and countless other private or state-owned parcel delivery services. The likely amount of fraudulent traffic to disguise Hi, a lot of internet traffic is now made up of mass additional WhatsApp Bitcoin chat, "Hi Dear" cold messages, And the infamous "Bio [edited for public decency]" account of recent Twitter fame. Those undersea fiber optic cables are straining under the weight of absolutely all this senseless, malicious spam.