Black Friday 2019 is the perfect time for hackers to steal users' money and credit cards: here's how to defend yourself
Black Friday 2019: time for discounts but also time for... scams. With the skyrocketing attention of potential customers, all intent on looking for the best offer for the product they've been wanting for so long, it's only logical that the smart ones put in place all possible strategies to exploit this high propensity to purchase.
The latest technologies available to hackers, on the other hand, allow them to attempt scams "en masse" with practically zero costs. The most popular scams during Black Friday, by the way, will not be all online: along with a predictable boom in phishing attempts and credit card data theft, the risk of so-called "USB Juice-Jacking" in large shopping malls is also expected to increase. What is this all about? By plugging your smartphone into public USB ports to charge it, hackers could take control of your device. Here are the three scams we need to be especially careful of during the pre-Christmas discount period.
Black Friday scams: fake sites and phishing
The rule is always the same: the more we are bombarded with promotional messages, the less attention we pay to each one. And if among the messages received there is a scam, which leads to a fake site set up only for phishing purposes, it is easier to fall for it. Get ready, then, to receive dozens of Black Friday-themed messages, some absolutely "clean" and others much more dangerous. Maximum attention, therefore.
Black Friday scams: beware of credit cards
For several years now, our credit card payments have increasingly been made online: we go to an e-commerce site, fill up the cart and pay with one of our cards. Without even taking it out of our wallet. In this way we avoid the danger of the "skimmers", that is those devices that are able to intercept the data of our credit card when we insert it in the Pos. But we expose ourselves to the risk of the theft of such data if we have recorded them on our profile on the site and the database of the site is violated by hackers. Prudence, therefore, suggests not to save this information on the e-commerce site, to use payment methods that add an extra layer of protection (Apple Pay, PayPal or Google Wallet) and to activate alerts on the cell phone in case of payment by card.
Black Friday scams: Juice-jacking in shopping centers
There is then a third possible scam to which we must be careful: the "Juice-Jacking". This is a procedure through which a hacker can take control of our smartphone if we connect it to a public charger, such as those that we increasingly find in airports and shopping centers. To be honest it's a technique that's not used much by hackers but since shopping mall chargers will have a lot of work to do during Black Friday 2019, making Juice-Jacking more attractive to cyber criminals, the best advice is not to use them.