Phishing attacks to rise during the holidays

GLOBAL cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab is warning consumers about financial phishing attacks that are expected to increase during the holidays.

Research by Kaspersky Lab specialists show 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,” the company said in a statement, adding that this was the case observed in previous years.

The study noted that “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; cybercriminals are preparing too.”

“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.

Kaspersky Lab’s threat statistics showed that in 2014 and 2015, the proportion of phishing pages that hunt financial data (credit cards details) detected by the company during the fourth quarter, which covers the holiday period, was around nine percentage points higher than the average for the year.

In particular, the result for financial phishing in 2014 was at 28.73 percent while the result for the fourth quarter stood at 38.49 percent. Last year, some 34.33 percent of all phishing attacks was financial phishing, while in the fourth quarter, financial phishing attacks accounted for 43.38 percent of all types of attacks.

In the last two years, 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.

Kaspersky said that 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.