Loyalty rewards programs enable cyber criminals to not only breach personal financial data, but to leverage victims’ existing rewards points in much the same way they would currency, according to OpenDNS.
Two notable Brazilian loyalty programs, Cielo Fidelidade and TAM Fidelidade, made the list of January’s top ten targeted brands. Of the top 10 brands targeted by phishing criminals, half are banks or financial institutions, including MasterCard and JP Morgan Chase among others, according to statistics from Open DNS’s PhishTank community.
Community members submitted nearly 20,000 phishing sites to PhishTank in January and, through a review and evaluation process that included more than 78,000 individual votes, deemed 71% of those phishes valid.
Last month, OpenDNS reported that cyber criminals took advantage of the holiday season by focusing on creating phishing sites to spoof financial services organizations and the travel industry.
Social media and gaming companies are again topping the list of most popular brands as their momentum in pop culture increases. Facebook, the world’s second most popular website, climbed back to near the top of the list of most targeted brands in January to become the second most popular target for cybercriminals.