Cyber attacks aiming at banking and e-wallet services increase in Lunar New Year. — Photo quantrimang.com

 Taking advantage of the upcoming Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday, when demand for online transactions, payments, gifts and to send lucky money increases, many hacker groups are stepping up their fraudulent activities aimed at users of banking services and e-wallets.

CyRadar JSC recently warned about two online attacks targeting the users of 27 banks and e-wallets.

Duong Thanh Hai, a CyRadar expert, said the company’s monitoring system recently detected two IP addresses of a server used for hosting fraudulent websites.

At least 180 fake domain names pointed to these two server clusters from the beginning of this year.

The fraudulent domain names mainly focus on impersonating 27 banks in Viet Nam, along with popular e-wallets. In addition, there are a number of fraudulent domains aimed at social networking users and gamers.

"Many websites which are still in the building process or cybercriminals who just point domain names to the server and prepare for future fraud campaigns have also been discovered," said the expert.

Previously, experts of the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) under the Authority of Information Security, Ministry of Information and Communications, predicted online fraud would increase.

One of the reasons the experts made the prediction is because of the unpredictable development of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Taking advantage of this, bad actors have used the vast amount of information related to vaccines, the responses of governments and organisations, and other long-term effects of the pandemic to carry out online attacks.

In addition, the trend of working online also increases the risk users could be exposed to cyber threats. In fact, taking advantage of the limited awareness of many users, phishing attacks account for the largest proportion of information systems in Viet Nam in recent years besides deface and malware attacks.

The NCSC system recorded 5,168 attacks causing problems on information systems in the country last year including 1,778 phishing attacks.

To prevent damage caused by phishing attacks, experts advise users not to click on unusual links and check website addresses carefully before entering a password.

Along with that, users also need to set up additional OTP codes for email accounts, social networks and bank accounts and security software to protect their computers and phones. — VNS

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