Netflix Users Become An Easy Target For Cyber Crime

JAKARTA - At the time of the global pandemic outbreak, people are still finding people who want to take advantage of this situation. Under the guise of Netflix, the cyber criminal is tricking people by changing the domain of the film streaming platform site.

According to a report by the United States (US) cyber security company BrandShield, since the beginning of 2020, they have detected 639 new domain names that embed the word 'Netflix' on their website. More than a third of the site's pages are fake websites created around March.

This film streming site is the target of many people, along with millions of people who have to carry out self-quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic. By utilizing film sites like this, the perpetrators can steal personal information from people who use streming services.

"When the world is locked, cyber criminals take advantage of people who spend more time online. Consumers of streaming websites are increasingly at risk of phishing attacks," BrandShield CEO Yoav Keren said as quoted by the Daily Mail, Thursday, April 16.

Several fake sites have been identified, namely netflixgiftcard.site and netflix-payment1.com. Through this site, cyber criminals will retrieve credential data belonging to Netflix users, including related social media accounts.

"We've seen an explosion in the domain names featuring Netflix when criminals want to find victims and extract financial or personal records," he continued.

Seeing this, Keren asked the government to immediately educate the public about the importance of their personal data, and not just share it on the internet. Because whoever has their personal data, the impact will be at great risk.

According to him, many Netflix users are deceived by fake streming sites on the internet. Moreover, ordinary users enter important information such as credit card numbers and bank accounts.

There are many cases of fake Netflix sites in Vietnam, several web pages such as netflixvietnam.com and netflixcoro.com.ve also disguised themselves as Netflix pages. Another case with the netflixhesap.site site, which disguises itself as a third-party site with the WordPress format.

To make matters worse, these sites are linked to Facebook's social media accounts. As a result, these cyber criminals will also steal related social media account information.

In this regard, cyberscurity firm Check Point Research also reported a phishing scam. Not a few of these cyber crimes have attacked the e-mail pages of Yahoo, Microsoft, Outlook and Amazon.

At least 59 percent of phishing cases disguised as Apple, Netflix and PayPal. Even 23 percent of them use Netflix or Apple streaming sites and the instant messaging service WhatsApp.

It was noted in a study from Verizon in 2019 that it found that 32 percent of all global data breaches were carried out through phishing scams. Attackers are known to disguise themselves as brand names which have a very large user base.