This week most retailers are ramping up to their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. As we have seen in past years, this has proved a hotbed for cybercrime and 2021 is no different, with Kaspersky recently discovering a significant spike in online payment fraud.

This as phishing attacks mimicking e-payment pages have been spotted with increasing regularity by the cybersecurity firm.

So much so that it reports the total number of financial phishing attacks disguised as e-payment systems more than doubled from September (627 560) to October 2021 (1 935 905), indicating a 208 percent increase.

“During the first ten months of 2021, Kaspersky products detected more than 40 million phishing attacks targeting e-commerce and e-shopping platforms, as well as banking institutions,” the company explains.

“While stores rebounded in 2021 after a difficult 18 months and shoppers returned to offline shopping, Kaspersky researchers didn’t observe the typical seasonal trends for phishing related to online shopping such as significant influx of phishing pages with too good to be true sale offers or growth of retail-related scam,” it adds. 

The reason for the recent rise, outside of opportunists targeting Black Friday and other seasonal sales, is the fact that there are simply far more new online payment services and platforms than there were previously, resulting in a rise in payment fraud.

Kaspersky notes that as there are more options for convenient online shopping, so the adoption by consumers has increased, meaning more targets for cybercriminals’ phishing attacks.

It also looks like criminals are mimicking many of the popular online retailers in order to dupe unsuspecting consumers on the lookout for great Black Friday deals.

“Kaspersky researchers have also analysed which popular platforms were used as bait to spread phishing pages. The results showed that Amazon was consistently the most popular lure used, when looking at the total number of phishing attempts using its name. For the majority of 2021, the second most popular was eBay, followed by Alibaba and Mercado Libre,” the firm adds.

“We always witness intensified scamming activity amid the Black Friday season. Perhaps a bit more unexpected is the attention being paid to e-payment systems. This time, we discovered a huge increase by 208% in a number of attacks mimicking the most popular payment systems. Of course, every new payment application is seen by scammers as a new opportunity to potentially exploit users,” points out Tatyana Shcherbakova, a security expert at Kaspersky.

When purchasing online this Black Friday, or any other time really, Kaspersky advises that consumers check to see whether online payment pages are secure by looking for “HTTPS” at the beginning of the url.

As always, if a deal seems too good to be true, it likely is.

[Image – Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash]