This is the season to watch out for cyberscams. If people are not careful, they could suffer from a huge plundering by the cyber grinches.
Crooks look for where the big money is and that means cyber criminals are starting to concentrate their expertise on social media and mobile devices.
With the two biggest shopping days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday quickly approaching, the criminals in cyberspace have started to flood social media postings, email and search results with web links that are tainted that offer products that are worthless and contain various scams.
Shopping during the holidays means fielding the recommendations from friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter, while using touch tablets and smartphones to look for available bargains and making purchases, which in turn translates to a huge bonanza for the criminal element.
One security strategist for cyberspace said that users tend to trust their mobile devices since no one else touches them. However, the hyper-connectivity and the small screen make it much easier for the scammer to have success.
The scammers are out in abundance. One identify verification company on the Internet dissected over 10 million transactions on computing devices over the last six months and found that 25% of the traffic from retail was on mobile devices. Within that amount, 10% was from tablets and 14% from smartphones.
Currently, said the security analyst, today’s smartphones are the least secure form of a purchasing platform.
The ID verification company discovered that over 1.3% of all e-commerce sales on the mobile phones were fraudulent and only 0.8% for desktops and over 0.5% for tablets.
Consumers should be using passwords that are robust, pay attention to sensitive information that gets stored and only patronize the Web properties that are trusted.
The biggest thing to remember said the security expert was to have a huge dose of skepticism during the holidays when it comes responding to certain requests.
