The Universe of Online Frauds
Online shopping is having its advent. Today, almost every Internet user shops online, in a business that moves massive amounts of money per day. In the United Kingdom alone, and as Voucherbox shows us with its real time UK Consumption stats, thousands of pounds are spent on online shopping each minute.
Taking advantage of this, hackers have multiplied the ways through which they try to steal people’s money and personal information. With this in mind, internet security is critical to prevent this, also being important to know these threats and how to deal with them.
Phishing
The hacker disguises himself as an institution or company that sends malicious emails in order to obtain sensitive information, like passwords, home banking access codes or bank account numbers. According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s (APWG) report, which indicates the trends of phishing activity, there were 128,378 reports of crimes related to this fraud between April and June of 2014, on a global scale.
These malicious emails aim to take users to access a fake online page via a link. One of the tricks most commonly used to is the creation of fake websites, mostly banking websites, which are very similar to the original portals of institutions. An unaware user can easily give the hacker some sensitive data, so it is important to pay attention to messages that include phrases such as “Follow the link below to confirm your data.”
Pharming
It is a type of computer virus installed on the computer without the user noticing, which automatically forwards correct URLs to fake pages, like the ones mentioned above. The information provided by the user is captured by the virus, and then sent to the hacker behind it. These viruses can be installed by downloading a seemingly harmless program, so users should be extra-careful when download and installing software on their computers.
Spyware
It is a malicious program that is installed on a computer without the knowledge of the users. Spyware can detect if users are accessing a secure Web page, such as home banking, and records the data entered by the user. Thus, the author of the spyware gets the information, which he can then use to steal money or even one’s identity.
Have you got any more insights on this subject? Let us know in the comments.
About the Author
Diogo Costa Programmer, writer, tech guy, musician and photographer. Only the first is for real, though.
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