Kaspersky Lab Tips On Staying Safe While Shopping Online!

Here is a short guide by the Kaspersky Lab team on how to stay safe while shopping online during the holiday sales, whether it’s for Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Christmas! Bookmark it for reference, and share this with your friends!

 

Kaspersky Lab Tips On Staying Safe While Shopping Online!

Why Is This Important?

14 families of malware targeting 67 different popular consumer brands around the world were recently detected. It caused the exposure of a large amount of client emails from a popular online shop.

Emails may seem a small matter but this sort of information is in fact precious to scammers. Any personal data can be used by cybercriminals to target their victims.

Increase in the share of financial phishing in the last years

How Do Scammers Compromise Your Personal Data?

If a company is compromised and scammers get hold of customer’s email addresses, they can create an automatized spam mailout that mimics an authentic email. This would entice users to follow a malicious link or download a malicious file onto their devices.

What Should You Do?

Be very careful as we head into the holiday sales season, from Black Friday till Christmas and Boxing Day sales – the busiest time of the year. Do not compromise your bank accounts by following a phishing link and entering your bank credentials. Research shows that malware designed to steal data from online banking and payment accounts has extended its reach to target online shoppers.

Amazon sent out a warning as soon as the leak was exposed. And, although Amazon’s actions have been criticized for a lack of technical detail and a recommendation not to change users passwords, it’s great that company’s representative’s didn’t hesitate to warn their customers about possible threats, asking them to be on the lookout to minimize possible damage,” said Tatyana Sidorina, security researcher at Kaspersky Lab.

Tips On Staying Safe While Shopping Online

To keep yourself safe from fraudsters while shopping online during this holiday season, Kaspersky Lab recommends taking the following precautionary measures:

  • Always check the link address and the sender’s email to find out if they are genuine before clicking anything – very often phishers create URLs and e-mails that are are very similar to the authentic addresses of big companies, yet differ from them with one or two letters.
  • To make sure you follow a correct link, do not click on it, but type it into your browser’s address line instead.
  • Do not enter your credit card details in unfamiliar or suspicious sites and always double-check the webpage is genuine before entering any personal information (at least take a look at the URL). Fake websites may look just like the real ones.
  • If you think that you may have entered your data into a fake page, don’t hesitate. Change your passwords and pin-codes ASAP. Use strong passwords consisting of different symbols.
  • Never use the same password for several websites or services, because if one is stolen, all of your accounts will be put at risk. To create strong hack-proof passwords without having to face the struggle of remembering them, use a password manager such as Kaspersky Password Manager.
  • To ensure that no one penetrates your connection to invisibly replace genuine websites with fake ones, or intercept your web traffic, always use a secure connection – only use secure Wi-Fi with strong encryption and passwords, or apply VPN solutions that encrypt the traffic. For example, Kaspersky Secure Connection will switch on encryption automatically, when the connection is not secure enough.

 

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