The latest report by Check Point Research highlights how 52% of brands deceive using a well-known "brand" arrive through imitations of the well-known portal dedicated to work 26/04/2022 by Enzo Boldi
It was almost inevitable. With the growth in the popularity of a site or a social platform, scam attempts multiply by graphically "pretending" to be those portals. At first it happened with Facebook, then again with Instagram, WhatsApp and many other applications of daily use and consumption. And now the phenomenon of brand phishing also hits LinkedIn hard. Already in recent months we had talked about scams with fake profiles for the promotion and sale of some products, but also about false emails coming (but not really) from that portal dedicated to work. And now comes a report on the first quarter of 2022 that confirms this trend. READ ALSO > Fake LinkedIn profiles for product promotion According to the latest report published by Check Point Research, in fact, brand phishing continues to change. What are we talking about? This is the classic phishing, therefore an attempt to scam (or scam, or theft of personal data, including banking) by exploiting the name of a well-known brand. Those who attempt this online scam, use graphic versions and urls that resemble (very closely) those of well-known widely used platforms. And in the latest survey made by the Californian research, a very worrying fact emerges. Brand phishing, the "imitations" of LinkedIn the most used LinkedIn imitations are the most widely used. Indeed, by far the most used. Because the research – which takes a snapshot of the first quarter of 2022 – indicates that 52% of brand phishing attempts (worldwide) came with emails from scammers posing as LinkedIn. A fact that is not surprising given that already in February we had talked about the numerous emails in which reference was made to the text: "There are people who are looking at your profile". A strategy in line with those already witnessed over the years. The other companies used for scams If LinkedIn covers more than half of the attempts at deception via email, in this cauldron we also find many other companies known all over the world, but far detached by quantity. According to the Check Point Research report, in second place is DHL (14%) and fake emails about "packages in stock". Then we find, in order: Google (7%), Microsoft (6%), FedEx (6%), WhatsApp (4%), Amazon (2%). In short, all well-known brands that are used to deceive users on the web through email communications (or even messages, as in the case of WhatsApp).