Phishing attacks increase on Sept-Oct '21 prior to Black Friday season

11/26/2021 04:20:38 PM

As the Black Friday sale season approached by, phishing attacks mimicking e-payment pages had shown a whopping increase. 

Kaspersky, through its Black Friday 2021: How to Have a Scam-Free Shopping Day report has cited that a total number of financial phishing attacks disguised as e-payment systems more than doubled from September (627,560) to October 2021 (1,935,905).

This was part of the cybersecurity company's statistics that saw them detecting  more than 40 million phishing attacks targeting e-commerce and e-shopping platforms, as well as banking institutions during the first 10 months of the year.

While stores rebounded in 2021 after a difficult 18 months and shoppers returned to offline shopping, Kaspersky researchers didn’t observe the typical seasonal trends for phishing related to online shopping such as the significant influx of phishing pages with too good to be true sale offers or growth of retail-related scam. 

That, however, has changed during the stretch of September and October, with an astonishing 208 percent increase—all despite seeing  the introduction of new payment systems in various countries due to their unmatched convenience. As consumer adoption has skyrocketed, fraudsters started to actively exploit such systems as a lure to spread malicious activity.

Aside from the massive phishing attacks, Kaspersky's products also spotted a rise in the number of spam letters. From 27 October to 19 November, the company recorded an active spread of spam emails with 221 745 emails containing the words “Black Friday.” 

Kaspersky researchers have also analyzed which popular platforms were used as bait to spread phishing pages. The results showed that Amazon was consistently the most popular lure used when looking at the total number of phishing attempts using its name. For the majority of 2021, the second most popular was eBay, followed by Alibaba and Mercado Libre.

“We always witness intensified scamming activity amid the Black Friday season. Perhaps a bit more unexpected is the attention being paid to e-payment systems. This time, we discovered a huge increase by 208% in a number of attacks mimicking the most popular payment systems. Of course, every new payment application is seen by scammers as a new opportunity to potentially exploit users,” said Tatyana Shcherbakova, a security expert at Kaspersky.

“So, in order to protect your data and finances it will be a safe practice to make sure the online payment page is secure: you’ll know it is if the web page’s URL begins with HTTPS instead of the usual HTTP and an icon of a lock will also typically appear beside the URL,” added Tatyana.

To enjoy the best that Black Friday has to offer this year, be sure to follow a few safety recommendations by Kaspersky:

• Use a reliable security solution, such as Kaspersky Security Cloud, that identifies malicious attachments and blocks phishing sites – both on your computer and mobile device
• Do not open attachments or click on links in emails from banks, e-payment apps, or shopping portals, particularly if the sender insists on it. It is better to go to the official website directly and log in to your account from there
• Double-check the format of the URL or the spelling of the company name, as well as read reviews and check the domain’s registration data before filling out any information
• Be wary of any deals that seem too good to be true – they usually are

Author: slickmaster | © 2021 The SlickMaster's Files