Holiday season expected to intensify financial phishing: Kaspersky

Only 13 days are left for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales to arrive, the biggest shopping day of the year in the UK. While most of the online users are waiting for the offers to arrive, cyber criminals are also waiting to make most of the opportunity.

According to Kaspersky Lab, the number of financial phishing attacks is expected to rise during the holiday season that unofficially starts from Black Friday and will continue till Christmas primarily because holidays influence the type of financial targets that criminals are after.

Both in 2014 and 2015 Kaspersky Lab researchers witnessed a significant increase in phishing attacks against payment systems and online stores. Attacks against banks also grew, but at a lower rate.

As Kaspersky Lab threat statistics shows, 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 Q4, that type of phishing was responsible for 43.38 percent of all attacks.

“In 2014, we conducted some research into how the phishing threat landscape behaves itself in the holiday period and discovered that the number of attacks against particular targets – payment systems and famous retail networks - increased during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period. In 2015, the situation repeated itself and this makes us think that in 2016 it will happen again. So we urge users to be as cautious as possible when shopping online this season,” said Andrey Kostin, senior web content analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

In order to avoid becoming a victim of holiday phishing scams during the upcoming holidays, Kaspersky Lab advises to follow the below-mentioned measures:

When trying to steal payment data, criminals use different schemes: they may create a fake payment page of a famous payment system or they may copy legitimate online retailer sites or even create 100 percent fake shops with incredibly attractive offerings.

• Do not click on any links received from unknown people or on suspicious links sent by your friends on social networking sites or via e-mail.

• If any websites are offering advantageous deals that look too good to be true, they most likely belong to criminals. Do not enter your credit card details on unfamiliar or suspicious sites.

• Always double-check the web page is genuine before entering any of your credentials or confidential information.

• Install a security solution on your device, with built-in technologies designed to prevent financial fraud.