Check Point experts report that hackers “celebrated” Valentine’s Day in a big way. The company’s analysts recorded more than 400 phishing campaigns dedicated to the holiday every week. At the same time, the number of new domains increased by 29% compared to last year and reached 23,000. About 2.3% of them (523) turned out to be malicious or suspicious.
Traditionally, February is the month of shopping for Valentine’s Day, and in the current pandemic environment, online shopping is on the rise and new forms of fraud are emerging.
The researchers write that this year, some attackers began reusing themes and web pages left over from past phishing campaigns. For example, an email purportedly originating from the Pandora brand was discovered that was similar to the Black Friday phishing campaign in November 2020.
In this message, the user was offered to buy jewelry at unreasonably low prices on the fake Pandora website (www [.] Pcharms [.] Com). In the text of the scammers, the year was not even changed – “The official site of Pandora 2020” instead of 2021, and the address of the company was written in lowercase letters – “northern lakes lane, laurel, md, 20723”. That is, the message contained clear signs that the letter came from a dubious source, and the site was fake. The sender name used the brand name, but the email address itself clearly had nothing to do with Pandora.
