by SAVIOUS KWINIKA
JOHANNESBURG – THE number of phishing pages has been increasing as the announcement date of the iPhone 14 nears.
iPhone 14
Apple has confirmed the long-awaited device will be announced to the public on September 7 during its global Apple Event.
Kaspersky said its experts had already found numerous examples of phishing pages, offering to buy the latest iPhone, but actually designed to empty victims’ bank accounts and steal their Apple ID accounts.
Overall, from August 10 to 25, Kaspersky security solutions detected more than 8 700 new iPhone-related phishing sites.
On August 25, Kaspersky experts detected a total of 1 023 iPhone-related phishing pages. This is almost twice the average number of such malicious sites detections per day for the period.
The cyber security company explained that traditionally, before the appearance of any new iPhone in the market, cybercriminals create fake store pages offering either to pre-order a new smartphone at a discount, or to even buy it before the official announcement.
Since official photos of the iPhone 14 have not yet appeared online, attackers use photos of older phone models to attract users’ attention.
After the victim enters their bank card data to pay for the purchase, funds will be debited from their card, but the user will not receive the order.
“Cybercriminals often monitor new trends much more actively than ordinary users,” said Olga Svistunova, security expert at Kaspersky.
Fraudsters are constantly looking for something trendy that would interest people, and therefore can be used as a bait to trick them into entering credentials or payment data, the expert said.
“The presentation of the new iPhone 14 is no exception and every year we see increasing activity of attackers around the annual release of new iPhone models.”
The upcoming device is subject to speculation.
Rumour has it the phone will be rolled out on September 16.
– CAJ News
