Norton Alert: Kim Kardashian robbery a gold mine for online scammers
Popular news generating high public interest and worldwide media attention, such as this incident, is the perfect moment for attackers to entice people to click on links or attachments. In fact, within the first 24 hours after the incident was made public, Norton recorded a whopping 2400% increase in Kim-Kardashian related spam and scams.
In order to make money, steal personal information or do damage, attackers used a social engineering tactic that uses current events as a hook to play on people’s emotions and attract attention. As a result, nearly one hundred different subject-line variations were seen in spam messages alone associated with Kardashian’s name, including ‘Breaking News’ and ‘Photos of’ in the subject line. The majority of messages Norton has tracked are in English, French and German.
Norton advises that consumers abide by the following top tips to stay safe from social engineering scams:
· Don’t open e-mails or click on attachments from those you don’t know;
· Be sceptical: Just because you’ve seen it on your newsfeed doesn’t mean it’s not a scam. Your friends may have fallen victim to a click-jacking scam and are not even aware of it;
· Think before clicking: Hover over the URL before clicking to see what kind of site you’ll be redirected to – a good rule of thumb is to visit only websites you know and trust. You can also use Norton Safe Search to verify a website’s legitimacy;
· Be suspicious of any calls to action: If it asks you to fill our information, download a plug-in (which could be malware in disguise) or share with friends before watching or reading the content, that should be an immediate red flag;
· Report suspicious activities or content to the social media platform or your e-mail service provider.
Further information and details on social engineering scams is available on Norton’s website.
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