Since October, the number of domains using the words “black friday” has tripled
On the eve of Black Friday, Kaspersky Lab published a report on current cyber threats in the field of online shopping. According to the company, in 2023, more than 13 million phishing attacks were detected worldwide, in which attackers disguised themselves as popular marketplaces, luxury brands, and gadget stores.
Phishing and scam remain among the most popular tactics among scammers. Thus, in the first ten months of 2023, the company’s solutions identified almost 31 million attacks worldwide aimed at online stores, payment systems and financial organizations. Moreover, in 43.5% of cases, attackers disguised themselves as e-commerce platforms (13 million attacks).
Since October, the number of domains using the words “black friday” has tripled. Among such sites there are both completely fictitious stores and plausible copies of real online sites.
Kaspersky Lab constantly detects numerous fake pages of clothing, household appliances and electronics stores. The most common scheme is in which people ultimately do not receive the goods they supposedly purchased.
Attackers also target those who are interested in gadgets. For example, they actively create fake pages offering Apple products. In general, from January to October 2023, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected globally 2.8 million phishing attacks on users mentioning products of this brand. Gamers also encounter fraud, particularly when trying to buy a game console.
Olga Svistunova, senior content analyst at Kaspersky Lab, said:
Store customers, especially during promotions such as Black Friday, are one of the main targets of attackers. Fraudsters are becoming more active, hiding behind a large number of mailings and offers. In addition to the indicated schemes, they can, for example, gradually write off the money of a person who has linked his card to a fake online store, or offer to buy non-existent gift certificates from well-known trading platforms. During this period, it is especially important to be careful and follow the rules of safe shopping: do not follow links from dubious messages, check the website address before entering personal data on it, and also use a security solution that will tell you if a person tries to follow a phishing or scam. -link.