Scammers targeting online shoppers on Cyber Monday in US

Scammers have decided to target online shoppers who are looking for bargain deals on Monday. People in America often head online after Thanksgiving looking for cheap online products. Last year almost $1 billion was generated on Cyber monday, beating out Black Friday as the highest volume sales day.

This year is set to be even bigger, close to $1.2 billion generated from sales, according to the National Retail Federation. Stephen Cobb, a security expert for ESET said “Even more holiday shopping will happen online this year than last, and that means more scammers will be looking to do some shopping of their own—possibly at your expense.”

eWeek add “The search term “Cyber Monday Deals” has seen a 400 percent increase in the month of November, according to search statistics available from Google. Cyber-criminals created fake Websites targeting keywords such as “tech,” “jewelry” and “toys” that poison search and appear high on results pages. When users land on these optimized pages, they are redirected to other malicious sites that download malware onto their computers or trick them into divulging personal information.

Enterprises are also at great risk on Cyber Monday, since a significant chunk of the online shopping will occur while people are at work. In fact, almost 60 percent of the nearly $900 million in online purchases two years ago on Cyber Monday were made from the workplace, McAfee said. While shopping, consumers will be “putting their organizations at risk for malware, spam, phishing scams” and other threats, the company said.”

Michael Sutton, the vice president of security research at Zscaler ThreatlabZ simply added that customers should be “beware of everything and everybody”. He continued that people should be “cautious, vigilant and wary about everything.” This includes search results, links, and of course emails that arrive highlighting bigger than life deals online. There are potentially thousands of fake websites being opened to target the online audience.

The eWeek article warns “For example, the research team at German security company “eleven” warned about emails promising a $50 iTunes gift certificate. The messages come with the subject line “iTunes Gift Certificate” and have a Zip file attached, which allegedly contains the special shopping code to use on the site. When the Zip file is opened, it actually executes the Trojan that installs itself and phones home to a remote server for additional instructions.”

Kitguru says: Be careful, you can bet if it is too good to be true, it probably is.

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