Hottest trend for phishing scammers: Buying web domains instead of hacking them
Hackers are increasingly abusing the highly decentralized web domain-name registration system to buy internet addresses they can use in phishing attacks, a new report says. The scams use legitimately acquired addresses to set up webpages that mimic bank or other e-commerce sites with the intention of tricking consumers into giving over login details and passwords. Such abuse of the domain-name registration system is not new, but it more than trebled last year, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s 2016 Global Phishing Survey, released last week. The report documents in detail more than a quarter-million individual phishing sites that mimicked the web presence of nearly 700 genuine banks or other financial, e-commerce or social media companies and attracted potential victims through links in spam email or other messages. Those 255,056 phishing sites were hosted on nearly 200,000 domains (some domains had multiple sites on them), almost half of which, or 95,424, were registered by hackers through the legitimate domain registration system, overseen by […]
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