Black Friday is coming – stay alert

Every year, in the last week of November we have the Black Friday (November 29th) madness of buying at reduced prices.blackfriday-countdown

“Stay alert” doesn’t mean that you should only keep an eye on those great offers. It means that you should not fall for the scams that are going to show up.

What is going to happen?

We expect to see the large spam and phishing campaigns related to this event. There are actually two events, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but the first one is the most well-known.

cybermonday

These events are too well-known to not be used by cyber criminals which always try to make use of the buying frenzy of the users. With the continuous growth of the social media websites like Twitter, Facebook and others, we see also a lot of such “offers” published there as well.

The campaigns start more than a week before the Black Friday , and are trying to lure users to buy various things at unbelievable prices before everyone else.

We also expect to see spams containing offers related to various opportunities of reselling the goods which were bought during this time and are not wanted by their owners. Exactly the same is happening after Christmas until middle of January every year.

All these have something in common: social engineering and greed.

We wrote many times about not buying from spams or from offers which are simply too good to be true or are coming from suspicious websites.

But here it is again:

 

Don’t buy from spams

I just want to remind you once more that the spammers get their money from those who offer the goods for sale. So, if you don’t want to receive spams on the long term, then don’t buy anything that is advertised in such emails or in Facebook and Twitter posts.

Another fact is that many of these offers are fake: that is, if you pay for a product, there is a good chance that you will never see the product and you lose your money for good. Some other websites deliver fake goods instead of mark products.

Always buy from websites which you or your friends know. Remember that not always the online website ratings are real, the various “security checked” seals can be easily faked and, most important of all, if something is too good to be true, then probably isn’t.

 

Sorin Mustaca

IT Security Expert

from Avira – TechBlog http://techblog.avira.com/2013/11/15/black-friday-is-coming-stay-alert/en/
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© Copyright 2013 Sorin Mustaca, All rights Reserved. Written For: Sorin Mustaca on Cybersecurity


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