The COVID-19 pandemic opened new doors for scammers. Ranging from phishing attacks to unemployment fraud, no attack vector has gone unexploited. Talking about phishing attempts, your spam folder provides you quite a detailed glimpse of the threats looming over you. As per a recent report, tech support scams have obtained the most-favorite status among phishing attacks, followed by survey and supplement scams.
Some stats your way
- In the past 100 days, Norton blocked 23.69 million phishing attempts, with the most number of tech, survey, and supplement scams.
- In the past quarter, 909 million threats were detected. Among these, 55.97 consisted of file-based malware and 405,710 were mobile malware.
- Phishing attacks witnessed a spike of 284% in June. In May, the increase was 281%, which can be attributed to spambot activities and an increase in SMBC and Amazon phishing.
Why does it matter?
- With the vast size of the online cookie ecosystem, opportunities for privacy violations have increased.
- The encryption feature in popular chat apps is being abused by threat actors to sell illegal stuff.
- Cybercriminals are concocting various social engineering techniques to target gamers.
Beware of other scams
- More than half (68%) of all Australians underwent some kind of tech support scam.
- An alleged Robocall scam targeted almost 58,000 individuals in Florida who became unemployed due to the pandemic.
- Scammers are capitalizing on the Windows 11 launch announcement. They are disseminating fake installers carrying malware.
The bottom line
Tactics leveraged by fraudsters have evolved - from cold calling to sophisticated schemes. People have been losing a lot of money from such scams mostly due to the lack of awareness. Tech support scams remain a pain in the neck across all industries and will possibly continue so until people are trained and educated on cyber threats. Government regulators should boost efforts for protecting consumers from phishing and other scams.
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