Phishing — especially phishing involving websites claiming to be from financial institutions — is growing, and criminals are getting better at their craft. A new report shows how attackers are using messages that closely mimic legitimate bank promotions to entice users to open email messages and click on links, then using those clicks and opens as the first step in campaigns that steal credentials, embezzle funds, and plant ransomware or other malware across systems.
The report, "The State of Financial Phishing" for the first half of 2019, demonstrates that one of the principal tools in fighting online fraud — the green "lock" icon that shows the website is protected by encryption — has now been co-opted by criminals to create a false sense of security in their malicious Web traps.
Criminals have found that the same free certificate authorities (CAs) making it easy for legitimate small businesses to protect their websites enhance the look and feel of bogus, criminal sites. Bob Maley, chief security officer at report sponsor Normshield, says that free CAs like LetsEncrypt have helped small organizations but with significant unintended consequences: "The shift to using domains with certificates changes the game," he says.
According to the report, the first six months of the year saw a 14% increase in domains potentially used in phishing campaigns and double the number of phishing domains that were certified by registrars. That works out to more than 1,900 potential phishing domains that were registered in the first half of 2019.
Maley says the rate of phishing domain registration is increasing, and he expects more tha ..
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