Happy Friday my friend,
Akamai is an Internet backbone provider, so they provide internet to the internet companies. Over the past few months, they did some traffic analysis and recently published a surprising find:
Phishing emails and text messages with fake USPS package delivery notices are getting at least as much traffic as the real USPS website.
In fact, on some weeks the scammers got even more people to go to their fake package delivery sites than usps.com. Why you ask? Under the pretext of being the post office, these scam sites are asking victims for all kinds of personal information such as dates of birth, social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, email passwords and so on.
And clearly, they're being successful.
The Takeaway
Shipping delivery scams are going nowhere, especially with our post-pandemic love of online shopping. Here are 3 quick tips to keep in your back pocket:
1) Did you receive a suspicious text message? Block the number. Same for email.
2) Are your social media accounts all set to private? If not, do it now. This is one of the easiest ways for bad guys to target victims.
3) Be careful not to enter personal information on a website, even if it looks legitimate. It doesn't matter if you clicked on a link from what seemed like a trusted source, including Facebook!
I did an interview on this very topic (SEO poisoning) back in January for the Honolulu Advertiser. In short, the bad guys are now buying ads to be distributed on legitimate websites such as Facebook and Google and are snagging victims that way.
Be present, be aware and when in doubt, don't type it out!
Stay safe out there.
-A
PS. Check out our short video on our presentation at this year's Hotel & Restaurant Show where we did a live lock picking demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlK-rvz-KkA
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