Cybercriminals are leveraging phishing e-mails that appear to have a domain name that looks legitimate to target various industries in Q3, according to a report by Kaspersky.

The service and the e-commerce industry have been the primary targets of such cyberattacks in Q3, accounting for 35 per cent of such attacks.

“The lookalike technique means phishing e-mails are sent from a domain that looks like a legitimate web address, but in fact may have a minor spelling error (such as a missing letter),” explained Kaspersky.

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“In many cases, a recipient is unlikely to notice the mistake, for example fraudsters will change @netflix.com to @netffix.com or use @kapersky.com instead of @kaspersky.com. The messages with lookalike domains pass authentication without any problems, have a cryptographic signature, and do not arouse the suspicion of anti-spam systems,” it added.

“In Q3 2020, services and e-commerce were hit the most, with IT & Telecom in second place,” Kaspersky said.

IT and Telecom accounted for over 22 per cent of such attacks.

The best way to prevent such attacks is to leverage anti-span solution that can spot such lookalike yet fake domains. Such solutions go through several stages of analysis, helping to identify the fake by comparing a suspicious domain to legitimate ones, rather than a list of false ones as per the cybersecurity firm.

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