CEBU, Philippines - Global cyber security company Kaspersky Lab warned holiday shoppers of the proliferation of money-hungry hackers who are monitoring online and card purchases.
In a statement, Kaspersky warned consumers that the number of financial phishing attacks is expected to rise during the holiday season which starts unofficially on so-called Black Friday and continues through Cyber Monday for the US and Christmas.
Retrospective research by Kaspersky Lab specialists shows that over the last few years the holiday period was marked by an increase in phishing and other types of attacks, which suggests that the pattern will be repeated this year.
A peak season for sales is obviously also a peak hunting season for criminals: retailers offer lots of hard-to-resist deals and people plan on spending money on gifts for themselves, their friends and relatives.
So, while e-commerce customers are making wishes for the upcoming sales, the retailers themselves are preparing their stores for a massive rise in the number of visitors, and financial infrastructure owners — banks and payment systems — are getting ready for a huge increase in the number and value of transactions; cyber criminals are preparing too.
Based on previous market monitoring, in 2014 and 2015 the proportion of phishing pages that hunt financial data (credit cards details) detected by the company during Q4 (which covers the holiday period) was around 9 percentage points higher than the average for the year.
In particular, the result for financial phishing in all of 2014 was 28.73 percent, while the result for Q4 was 38.49 percent.
In 2015, 34.33 percent of all phishing attacks was financial phishing, while in the fourth quarter of the same year, that type of phishing was responsible for 43.38 percent of all attacks.
In holiday seasons in years 2014 and 2015, Kaspersky Lab researchers witnessed a significant (several percentage points) increase in phishing attacks against payment systems and online stores. Attacks against banks also grew, but at a lower rate.
When trying to steal payment data, criminals use different schemes: they may create a fake payment page of a famous payment system, or they copy legitimate online retailer sites or even create 100 percent fake shops with incredibly attractive offerings.
In order to avoid becoming a victim of holiday phishing scams during the holiday shopping periods like Christmas Kaspersky Lab experts advise the following measures: Do not click on any links received from unknown people or on suspicious links sent by your friends on social networking sites or via email. They can be malicious; created to download malware to your device or to lead to phishing webpages aimed at harvesting user credentials.
Do not enter your credit card details on unfamiliar or suspicious sites, to avoid passing them into cybercriminals’ hands. If these websites are offering advantageous deals that look too good to be true, they most likely belong to criminals.
Always double-check the webpage if it is genuine before entering any of your credentials or confidential information (at least take a look at the URL).
Fake websites may look just like the real ones. So Kaspersky recommended to install a security solution for any device, with built-in technologies designed to prevent financial fraud. (FREEMAN)