At the beggining of the holiday season everyone has to get ready, even cyber-criminals. And they are doing it quite vigorously, thus frustrating businesses and customers alike. The trend is cybersquatting and phishing. Both of these practices have become a lot more popular over the past year: cybersquatting has grown by 20% and phishing by 500%.
Cybersquatting is the tactic of hijacking a name or phrase using a web domain to point to a different web-site. "We're still seeing a fair amount of sponsored links across all of the online ad providers that are not from the brands they represent," said Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer of MarkMonitor. Retailers care about such brand abuse it diverts the traffic from their websites as well as stains their name by failing to provide services.
Phishers are also very active with scams such as "receive a free gift card by filling out this form", providing sensitive personal information in the process. Meanwhile counterfeit gift cards are seen all over eBay and other such sites. Retailers are also suffering from phishing schemes, especially the said eBay and PayPal. Phishers are using these and other brand names to trick people. The increase in these schemes can be attributed to self-updating phishing kits, that can be bought at a relatively low price on the black market. Fast flux DNS networks – the use of a quickly changing network to capitalize on hosted DNS to create more resilient phish sites is also on the rise. Renting phishing infrastructure such as botnets is also becoming more and more popular and available.
There are only few ways to prevent phishing and other similar activities. The most efficient seems to be consumer awareness of the issues at hand as well as using strong unique passwords on websites that contain sensitive information about their person.
Cybersquatting is the tactic of hijacking a name or phrase using a web domain to point to a different web-site. "We're still seeing a fair amount of sponsored links across all of the online ad providers that are not from the brands they represent," said Frederick Felman, chief marketing officer of MarkMonitor. Retailers care about such brand abuse it diverts the traffic from their websites as well as stains their name by failing to provide services.
Phishers are also very active with scams such as "receive a free gift card by filling out this form", providing sensitive personal information in the process. Meanwhile counterfeit gift cards are seen all over eBay and other such sites. Retailers are also suffering from phishing schemes, especially the said eBay and PayPal. Phishers are using these and other brand names to trick people. The increase in these schemes can be attributed to self-updating phishing kits, that can be bought at a relatively low price on the black market. Fast flux DNS networks – the use of a quickly changing network to capitalize on hosted DNS to create more resilient phish sites is also on the rise. Renting phishing infrastructure such as botnets is also becoming more and more popular and available.
There are only few ways to prevent phishing and other similar activities. The most efficient seems to be consumer awareness of the issues at hand as well as using strong unique passwords on websites that contain sensitive information about their person.
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