Holiday Scams Soon to Appear; How to Recognize Them
Posted by: Timothy Weaver on 11/25/2015 09:43 AM
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The holidays are rapidly coming upon us and you can expect to be inundated with scams.
The Amazon Phish:
Cyber criminals are attacking Amazon users with a phishing campaign that falsely claims a small number of accounts have been hacked. You are required to "verify" your Amazon account, by providing payment card information and security details.
Ad Poisoning:
Cybercriminals fool the ad network into thinking they are a legit advertiser, but the ads which are displayed on major websites are poisoned. Disable Adobe Flash on your computer - or at least set the Adobe Flash plug-in to "click-to-play" mode - which blocks the automatic infections.
Facebook dislike button:
Zuckerberg mentioned that for years users had been asking about a 'dislike button', and that Facebook was finally working on such an option. Scammers try to lure users to "get the new dislike button" in their profile. These attacks wind up giving out confidential information, install malware on their machine, install rogue browser plugins and/or get inundated with unwanted phone calls, emails and snail mail trying to sell them various products.
Star Wars Movie Tickets:
For the next two months this is going to be a highly successful social engineering attack that a lot of users are going to fall for.
The Syrian Boy:
The picture of 3-year-old Syrian boy Alyan Kurdi is used for a variety of scams, Facebook spammers to start with.
Ashley Madison Extortion:
This is a message you could receive: "I now have your information. If you would like to prevent me from finding and sharing this information with your significant other send exactly 1.0000001 Bitcoins.....
Business email compromise:
This is a serious scam in which the crooks gather info on a company and when the time is right, they send a fake email to the accounting dept. and get them to send money on a fake invoice. According to the new FBI report, thieves stole nearly $750 million in such scams from more than 7,000 victim companies in the U.S. between October 2013 and August 2015.
Tech support scams:
This is a phone call or popup message that tries to get the victim to allow the scammers to log into your system and sell you unneeded apps or a security fix. Often the purpose is to get banking info or other personal info.
Be safe and secure this holiday season.
Source: SCOonline
The Amazon Phish:
Cyber criminals are attacking Amazon users with a phishing campaign that falsely claims a small number of accounts have been hacked. You are required to "verify" your Amazon account, by providing payment card information and security details.
Ad Poisoning:
Cybercriminals fool the ad network into thinking they are a legit advertiser, but the ads which are displayed on major websites are poisoned. Disable Adobe Flash on your computer - or at least set the Adobe Flash plug-in to "click-to-play" mode - which blocks the automatic infections.
Facebook dislike button:
Zuckerberg mentioned that for years users had been asking about a 'dislike button', and that Facebook was finally working on such an option. Scammers try to lure users to "get the new dislike button" in their profile. These attacks wind up giving out confidential information, install malware on their machine, install rogue browser plugins and/or get inundated with unwanted phone calls, emails and snail mail trying to sell them various products.
Star Wars Movie Tickets:
For the next two months this is going to be a highly successful social engineering attack that a lot of users are going to fall for.
The Syrian Boy:
The picture of 3-year-old Syrian boy Alyan Kurdi is used for a variety of scams, Facebook spammers to start with.
Ashley Madison Extortion:
This is a message you could receive: "I now have your information. If you would like to prevent me from finding and sharing this information with your significant other send exactly 1.0000001 Bitcoins.....
Business email compromise:
This is a serious scam in which the crooks gather info on a company and when the time is right, they send a fake email to the accounting dept. and get them to send money on a fake invoice. According to the new FBI report, thieves stole nearly $750 million in such scams from more than 7,000 victim companies in the U.S. between October 2013 and August 2015.
Tech support scams:
This is a phone call or popup message that tries to get the victim to allow the scammers to log into your system and sell you unneeded apps or a security fix. Often the purpose is to get banking info or other personal info.
Be safe and secure this holiday season.
Source: SCOonline
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