Phishers implement a variety of tricks to bypass email blocking and attract as many users as possible to their fraudulent sites.
Muscat: Attacks similar to data loss threats (phishing and scam/social engineering) increased particularly in the current quarter of 2022 to 192% compared to the last quarter in Oman, Kaspersky research revealed. The company’s security responses detected 865,691 phishing attacks in Oman at the fourth moment.
Social engineering, often referred to as a “human hacking” scam, is used in many other tactics and for other purposes to lure reckless users to the site and trick them into entering non-public information. The latter includes monetary credentials such as bank accounts, passwords or payment card details, or login credentials for social media accounts. In the wrong hands, this opens the door to various malicious operations, such as stealing cash or compromising corporate networks.
Phishing is a difficult attack approach because it is practiced on a large scale. By sending giant waves of emails with the names of valid establishments or selling fake pages, malicious users increase their chances of good fortune by searching for the credentials of innocent people. Phishers implement a variety of tricks to bypass email blocking and attract as many users as possible to their fraudulent sites. A non-unusual strategy is HTML attachments with partially or totally obfuscated code. HTML files allow attackers to use scripts, obfuscate malicious content to make it harder to detect, and send phishing pages as attachments instead of links.
In particular, while the holiday season is high, scammers try to attract travelers looking for attractive places to take away, reasonable accommodation, and fairly expensive flights. Kaspersky researchers have observed an intensification of scam activity, with many phishing pages distributed under the guise of airlines and booking facilities. The number of attempts to open phishing pages similar to air reservations and facilities in the first part of 2022 was 4311 in the META region.
“Planning a vacation is not easy. People can spend weeks or even months looking for the best position to stay and tickets to get there. Scammers use it to lure users who are tired of looking for bargains. After two years of flight restrictions imposed through the pandemic, he is back. But the same goes for scams, with intensified scam activity targeting users through fake booking and rental services. Such attacks are preventable, so we urge users to be careful about being offers. If an offer sounds too smart to be true, it probably is,” said Mikhail Sytnik, a security expert at Kaspersky.
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