Fake online travel booking sites trapping travelers to phishing attacks

September 27, 2019
antiphising anti-phising phising attack

As we all know, online travel booking sites provides many advantages to travelers. It offers hassle-free management of bookings as it works 24/7, faster payment transaction, and less phone time. But nowadays where internet phishing is becoming more popular when it comes to online attacks, one should be very careful in choosing the best online travel booking sites.

This May 2019, a lot of internet scammers are seeking to exploit people’s desire to secure a good travel bargain. Researchers were able to uncover multiple operations during the month of May while tracking the activity of malicious spammers and phishers. They found out that more than 8,000 phishing attacks masquerades as offers from popular lodging platforms. It includes several email blasts appearing to come from a legitimate travel brand that signs up victims to paid mobile services.

Researches also detected seven different e-mail blasts disguised as offers from popular booking platforms for airplane tickets and accommodation in the space of just one day. It happened last May 21, 2019 where three of the e-mails appeared to offer free flights in return for completing a short online survey and sharing the link with others. Once the customers have been deceived, users are required to answer three questions from the travel site and they were also asked to enter their phone number, which the scammers then used to subscribe the victim to paid mobile services.

Before this incident happened, a phishing scam was also detected between late April and late May where a internet phishing site disguised as popular websites for booking rental accommodation, such as Airbnb. It exploits 7,917 attacks to online flight bookers. Andrey Kostin, a security researcher, said that late spring and early summer are a popular time for scammers, as they exploit people looking for a last-minute holiday booking. He further added that they urge people to use only legitimate websites for booking tickets and accommodation and to make sure they are protected by a security solution with a strong spam and phishing filter that will spot fraudulent approaches before they get to you.

 

About the author

Leave a Reply