Shop Safer By Shopping Gray Saturday
By: Jim Stickley and Tina Davis
November 24, 2017
So you want to go shopping this holiday season, but you’re wary of diving right into the whole online shopping madness and fear theft of your payment card or other confidential information. And it’s not an unjustified fear. In fact, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the least safe for shopping when it comes to phishing scams. And according to Kaspersky Lab, there is another day that is it determined to be the safest day to dip one's toes into the online shopping pool.
Surprisingly, even though the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend is a popular shopping day, the number of phishing attacks actually decrease by as much as 33% on “Gray Saturday.” Why is that, one may ask?
The short answer is because it’s a weekend. Yes, it’s as simple as that. It isn’t because the scammers take weekends off. It’s because people who work in offices and use email as a regular communication method at work generally take off weekends. Therefore, they are not sitting at their office desks shopping for sales on Saturday and Sunday. They are not clicking attachments or links that they may receive in their work email accounts, which are the targets for phishing scammers these days. They are not using their work computers to browse retailers’ sites.
Whether it’s officially allowed or not, employees do use work computers for personal tasks on a regular basis. By not being in the office, the risk of being scammed by phishing is lowered.
However, while taking advantage of Gray Saturday, and all other online shopping days:
- Don’t click on links or attachments arriving in email from unknown senders or that are not expected.
- Don’t shop using public or unsecured Wi-Fi networks to send sensitive information.
- Make sure you trust the websites you’re using for shopping. Look for the secure website indicators such as the lock icon, the “https:” in the address bar, or the green text.
- Use previously bookmarked websites or be very careful typing in the addresses. Scammers will try to trick users by creating websites that are extremely realistic and using URLs that are very similar to the actual ones. This is called “domain jacking,” do-jacking, or typosquatting.
- Don’t fall for emails asking for personal details to be entered into a form or after clicking a link. Go directly to your online accounts and verify information through there.
- Make sure all your online shopping devices have anti-virus software installed and that it’s kept updated. Update all your online shopping apps as well.
Financial phishing accounts for nearly half of all phishing attacks and scammers are taking advantage of events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They are becoming trickier all the time and disguising messages as security alerts, financial institution “secure messages,” and even “you’ve been hacked” messages. According to Kaspersky, roughly 46% of employees use work email to send personal messages and 45% of them use the Internet for personal activity while at work. Scammers are well aware of this. Phishing attacks make up 26% of enterprise fraud. This is second only behind worms or viruses. Be sure to know the risks and limit exposure by shopping on Gray Saturday from the comfort of your own sofa rather than at work.