Apple was most impersonated brand in phishing scams in Q1 2020: Check Point research

A research has found that Apple has been the most used brand name for impersonation. This means maximum people have received mails or messages claiming it is from Apple but sent by a fictitious source. As per a Livemint report quoting the research, the next highest turned out to be Netflix.

Among the many ways scamsters gain access to your connected devices, doing it through PCs, tablets or mobile phones is what is known as phishing. Phishing is a process by which you may receive a mail or message asking you to click on a link or open an attachment which will take you to a malicious webpage. Once you fall for this, the attacker can plant a malware in your system and steal important information like bank passwords etc. The most important part of a phishing attack is the email or message will be from a fake sender but very familiar, like your bank or a service provider. Most people are not aware that the fake URLs can be identified, and caution exercised to avoid the temptation.

These cybercriminals are usually ahead of the curve and know where the interest of the common people lay. These are times when most people are home-bound. They may be searching for information on what’s new on Netflix and if they see a mail claiming to offer some information, they will simply go ahead and click without realizing that they are unknowingly inviting trouble.

The research done by Check Point Research has other interesting details as well. It says of all the cyberattacks they examined, 18% were accounted for by email based phishing scams. The brand names that figured here maximum were Yahoo, Microsoft, Outlook and Amazon. 59%, the largest, were web-based phishing attacks. Here Apple, Netflix and PayPal figured prominently. In 23% cases it was mobile-based phishing and here again Apple, Netflix and WhatsApp were the top three brand names fraudulently used.

An interesting way the cybercriminals mounted a phishing attack has come to light. Airbnb is a popular site used by travellers across the globe for accommodation in various cities. Now, they found a site that claimed to provide details of the services available during the COVID-19 outbreak and the URL of this site was hxxps:/Airbnb.id-covid19\.com/update/login\.php.

Now this is clearly a fake site and people generally in a hurry don’t exercise caution and go about using the page to login to their Airbnb account. This is enough for the attacker to make a malicious entry into your device.

A similar attempt was made with the customers of Chase Bank.

You have to be very careful while logging into new sites or familiar sites with strange URLs.