Phishing Pink Day: Cyber-criminals Lure People in Love | Antivirus Software

Increase of 29% compared to the previous year

Check Point's security experts warn of a dangerous surge in phishing campaigns around Valentine's Day.

The security researchers at Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP) had already warned last year that hackers were showing an increasing interest in Valentine's Day. Also this year they use the day of the lovers again to bring their victims of money and data. This is evident from the observations of newly registered domains that have Valentine's Day as their theme - in January 2021 Check Point was able to observe an increase of 29 percent compared to the previous year.

Email phishing campaigns are once again very popular. Check Point's latest results show that over 400 different phishing emails are currently being sent each week in connection with Valentine's Day. Alleged offers from online retailers, for example for jewelry, are particularly popular. For the Black Friday sale last year, hackers pretended to be the online jeweler called Pandora to defraud their victims - now they have only changed the date and other little things on their fake website and are trying again to get people through false offers and discounts to be trapped.

What makes the cybercriminals' work easier is of course the Corona crisis: It forces people to use their computers and mainly to shop online. The chance is therefore higher than a fake order confirmation via email will deceive a user. If people then visit the fake websites, which usually look deceptively real, via one of the phishing links, they are often asked to log in or create a user account and store payment information - they have fallen into the trap and the data ends up with the scammers. Check Point therefore urgently recommends that you take special care when looking through your own mailbox and that you always check an email to ensure that it is serious.

BitDefender considers the following three types of messages to be particularly dangerous for the security of its members:

Messages promoting special Valentine's Day versions of well-known Facebook scams such as the message "See who views your profile". According to BitDefender, cybercriminals turn it into something special on Lover's Day: "My ex is the top stalker of my profile. When clicking on the link provided, the user loads an infected application onto his computer. The particular problem: the fake postings that the application sends are published under the name of the respective user. In this way, they give the impression of being real. This application spreads rapidly across the entire network. As soon as a user sees such posts, BitDefender advises them to check them for malware infections.

Messages that promised secret insights: Here, the user is baited with links that advertise, for example, revealing "12 things a woman wants from a man". If the user clicks on the link sent, he unknowingly starts the installation of an application that floods his own pinboard and that of his friends with automatically generated entries.

Messages that advertise the disclosure of unknown suitors: This procedure is similar to the one previously described. If the user follows the given link, instead of an application that exposes secret crushes, an application that sends spam postings is installed.

Take proper precautions before fall into trap of cybercriminals on valentine's day. To keep your data safe you are required to install antivirus software.