As gift cards become increasingly popular, so do the risks of gift card fraud and hacking. Protecting yourself from gift card hackers is crucial in today’s digital age. In this article, we will provide you with some tips and tricks that you need to know to safeguard your gift card balances and personal information. Whether you’re a frequent gift card user or new to this form of payment, the following information will help you avoid becoming a victim of gift card fraud.
What are gift card hackers and how do they operate?
Gift card hackers are cybercriminals who steal gift card codes or hack into gift card accounts to steal the balance.
How can you protect yourself from gift card fraud?
To protect yourself from gift card fraud, you should avoid sharing your gift card information with anyone, only purchase gift cards from reputable retailers, and monitor your gift card balances regularly.
Can you prevent gift card fraud altogether?
While it is difficult to prevent gift card fraud altogether, you can take steps to reduce the risk of becoming a victim.
What should you do if you suspect gift card fraud?
If you suspect gift card fraud, you should contact the gift card issuer or retailer immediately to report the issue.
In conclusion, protecting yourself from gift card hackers should be a top priority for anyone who regularly uses gift cards. By following the tips and tricks outlined in this blog post, you can significantly reduce your risk of falling victim to gift card fraud. Whether it’s being vigilant about checking the balance on your cards, avoiding suspicious websites and emails, or using secure payment methods, there are plenty of steps you can take to safeguard your gift cards and keep your personal information safe. So don’t wait any longer – start implementing these tips today and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing your gift cards are secure.
Sure, ransomware understandably hogs the media headlines these days, but cybercriminality goes way beyond ransomware attacks. Very simply put, the crooks were after as many accounts as they could access to buy as many gift cards as they could as quickly as possible. As you probably know, gift cards that you purchase online are typically delivered by email to a recipient of your choosing as a secret code and a registration link. So, receiving a gift card code is a bit like getting hold of the number, expiry date and security code from a prepaid credit card loosely speaking, whoever has the code can spend it. Any tipoff you can get that suggests a crook might be in your network is a tip worth looking at. Fortunately, it seems that only a few of the users attacked in this way had saved their credit card details for automatic re-use when making purchases, which is probably why the crooks only managed a few hundred dollars of gift card purchases before being spotted. Apparently, numerous users who needed to re-reset their altered passwords to get back into their accounts noticed that there were gift cards queued up for purchase in their online shopping carts, but that the crooks had not been able to finalise those purchases. The crooks also downloaded and installed a popular free file search tool to help them look for interesting files across the network. This tool left behind a logfile that reveals that the criminals were actively hunting for personal and confidential data relating to both the company and to its staff. As far as we can tell, the file searching seems to have been a secondary interest to these criminals, who were but determined and persistent in their attempts to make fraudulent purchases against as many users of the network as they could. That had the side-effect of locking users, including one of the sysadmins, out of various company systems. The speed and determination of these crooks, speculatively logging into email account after email account, is an excellent reminder of why defence in depth is important. Follow NakedSecurity on Twitter for the latest computer security news. Skip to content. XG Firewall. Intercept X. For Home Users. Free Security Tools. Free Trials. Product Demos. Have you listened to our podcast? Listen now. Sophos Cloud Optix Monitor 25 cloud assets for free. Thanks glad you found them useful! Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! What do you think? Recommended reads. Oct Dec
The data in this story come from a trusted source in the security industry who has visibility into a network of hacked machines that fraudsters in just about every corner of the Internet are using to anonymize their malicious Web traffic. Bill said this criminal group averages between five and ten million email authentication attempts daily, and comes away with anywhere from 50, to , of working inbox credentials. With his visibility into the proxy network, Bill can see whether or not an authentication attempt succeeds based on the network response from the email provider e. But based on interactions that Bill has had with several large email providers so far, this crime gang merely uses custom, automated scripts that periodically log in and search each inbox for digital items of value that can easily be resold. A sample of some of the most frequent search queries made in a single day by the gift card gang against more than 50, hacked inboxes. Why go after hotel or airline rewards? Because these accounts can all be cleaned out and deposited onto a gift card number that can be resold quickly online for 80 percent of its value. How do the compromised email credentials break down in terms of ISPs and email providers? There are victims on nearly all major email networks, but Bill said several large Internet service providers ISPs in Germany and France are heavily represented in the compromised email account data. That may sound like a lot of hacked inboxes, but Bill said some of the bigger ISPs represented in his data have tens or hundreds of millions of customers. Measuring which ISPs and email providers have the biggest numbers of compromised customers is not so simple in many cases, nor is identifying companies with employees whose email accounts have been hacked. This kind of mapping is often more difficult than it used to be because so many organizations have now outsourced their email to cloud services like Gmail and Microsoft Office where users can access their email, files and chat records all in one place. Looking at the small set of Internet address blocks he knows are associated with Microsoft email infrastructure, Bill examined the IMAP traffic flowing from this group to those blocks.