News broke afternoon of a study by Riskified an eCommerce fraud-prevention company, and IntSigns, who collected data on hundreds of thousands of illegal online purchases. The companies found that there was a 297 percent spike in the number of fake retail websites designed to phish for customer credentials from July to September 2017 to that same period in 2018.
Corin Imai, Senior Security Adviser at DomainTools:
“The fact that phishing has risen so sharply suggests that despite the warnings provided to the general public regarding cyber in recent years, carelessness is still costing millions of unlucky victims a year. It’s interesting that University-aged victims are singled out in the report, as they are the ones who should be up to speed with the latest scams. As people who have grown up in an Internet connected world, perhaps their over-confidence online could be their downfall.
People of all age groups as well as organisations need to make sure they exercise extreme caution when opening emails from unknown senders, and should always make sure they check the legitimacy of any domain, or file which they choose to download, particularly where financial information is concerned. Phishing not only affects the victims dramatically, but the data and capital harvested serves as a pipeline for future cybercrime.”