The latest intelligence analysis revealed that attacks involving data loss threats, including phishing and social engineering fraud in Kuwait witnessed a massive increase in the second quarter of 2022 compared to the previous quarter by 115 percent, and Kaspersky Security Solutions discovered 784,043 phishing attacks occurred in Kuwait in the second quarter of 2022.
Phishing is one of the effective attack methods, given its wide scope, as cybercriminals increase their chances of success in searching for users’ login data to various types of accounts, by sending massive waves of emails disguised under the names of official organizations and brands.
Criminals employ a variety of tricks to bypass email bans and attract as many users as possible to their fraudulent sites. Scammers commonly resort to HTML attachments that contain obfuscated code, which allow them to use scripts and obfuscate malicious content to make it harder to detect, sending phishing pages as attachments instead of links.
The principles of social engineering, sometimes called “human hacking” fraud, are used in many ways and for different purposes, all of which aim to entrap reckless or unwary users by luring them to fake sites and tricking them into entering their personal information, which often includes data registration, access to financial accounts, such as bank account passwords or payment card details, as well as login data to social media accounts, which opens the way for many malicious operations, such as money theft and penetration of institutional networks.
Scammers, at the height of the holiday season, try to entrap travelers who are looking for the best travel destinations, the most suitable accommodation and the cheapest flights. Kaspersky researchers have observed an increase in phishing activity under the guise of airline and hotel reservations, with 4,311 attempts by users to open these sites in the first half of 2022 in the Middle East, Turkey and Africa.
Mikhail Sitnik, a security expert at Kaspersky, said that planning an enjoyable vacation “is not easy,” noting that travelers may spend weeks or even months searching for flight reservations and suitable accommodation.
He said fraudsters take advantage of this to attract the attention of users who are tired of searching for suitable deals, after opening the atmosphere and lifting restrictions after the global crisis, travel has returned and the frauds associated with it, targeting users with fake booking and rental services.
Such attacks can be prevented entirely by questioning the overly generous promotions that are hard to believe.