The Christmas season is a season of joy, laughter and happiness. This is the period where our favorite channels would play our favorite shows, and our favorite website and social media would post enticing festive content. But, one thing to take note of is this period is very common for cybercriminals to take advantage of the festive spirit to perpetuate their devious tactics.

 

It is important to be cautious of our activities this festive period to avoid falling victim to cyber criminals. 

 

One popular criminal act done this period is luring users to click on unverified links. Once you click on the link, it redirects to a different, oftentimes malicious site, with its landing page identical to a popular website. In this fluke site, instructions of how to qualify for a free gift or discount promo code is usually the tactic used to steal peoples personally identifiable information such as names, phone numbers, email address, house address etc. to be sold on the dark web. These sites may also be injected with malicious codes where clicking on any button can introduce malware into your device. An example is shown in this images:

If you look closely, you would see they replicated a popular shopping site called SHEIN, luring you to take a short quiz which can enable you to qualify for a gift card. If SHEIN is having a discount black friday sales or any kind of promo, they would not send out links, rather, they would send out emails, post on their official social media pages and also send notifications through their apps as well. Always check their media for updates, before clicking on any link.

The comment section of the site was also forged to look very real. This would lure the mind of users to believe the site is real, and make them click on the quiz and follow whichever instructions they’re told to do. It is important to make research on companies or on fraudulent links, to confirm if they’re real or fake. These links would be flying very well this period, so we have to be extra careful.

 

CONCLUSION

This is one of the ways that cyber criminals would hack into your computers and steal personal information. It’s the most vulnerable time of the year, and staying vigilant on these new trends would help us avoid falling victim to their attacks.

We are Platview Technologies. We are an innovative and agile cybersecurity company with the goal of safe-guarding businesses with our world-class, industry-leading services and technology solutions. We commit to understanding your business objectives and goals to align a tailored security services and strategy allowing your business to grow without added security risk.