The COVID-19 pandemic has exponentially increased online shopping, and with it, the number of users who enter their banking information on various online stores. PayPal is well known, an online payment method that links our credit cards with websites. Millions of users use it daily, and cybercriminals will take advantage of the opportunity.
Last week, on this same blog, we highlighted the spectacular increase in the number of people affected by Phishing attacks. Among the millions of potential victims, a large majority could be affected by the most recent scam in which an attacker could steal our PayPal data.
The mechanics are simple. The victim receives an email informing them of a “problem” with their credit card that must be resolved. The same email includes a link that gives us access to a chat with a “worker” of “PayPal” who will solve the problem for us. It goes without saying that both the email and the chat page are very, very faithful imitations of an actual PayPal page. At last, After a few minutes of persuasion, the victim has given their information to the attacker.
Unfortunately, Thousands of people fall for this type of attack every day. We could not consider this an information theft, because the victim is tricked into giving the attacker what they need. Some good practices when using email, good filtering systems and, above all, Common sense will prevent us from having any kind of personal information stolen. Let's be careful.