Tis the season, after all. The season of giving. The season of sharing. The season of buying with PayPal. The season to hurriedly check one’s email and click on links without thinking.
Or so it would seem according to anti-virus software maker TrendMicro. According to their research, phishing, black hole exploits and electronic pilfering of all kinds spiked during the 2012 Christmas season. And color me shocked! PayPal gets the hands-down biggest number of exploits. Including mobile:
Mobile users, unfortunately, are not exempted from this swath of online threats. [click for link] is an example of a spoofed PayPal for Mobile site that users should be wary of. Because mobile users will typically not see the whole URL, users may readily think that they visited the legitimate website.
It is easy to blame PayPal for the persistent problem of bank security online and it is certainly true that they’ve had their lackadaisical response to security issues in the past. But at this point, PayPal represents one of only a handful of high-profile payment gateways that can be used to dupe users.