Apparently cyber-criminals have an affinity not just for stealing credentials but more specifically for stealing user credentials for pornography sites, according to a new report from Kaspersky Lab.
The findings
The new report found that in 2018 nearly 110,000 people were attacked with credential-stealing malware that specifically targeting premium pornography account holders. That’s more than double the 50,000 people who faced this threat in 2017.
Apparently, the credential-stealing malware attacks were most often distributed through botnets. Its said that the attackers would “intercept a victim’s traffic” and redirect them to fake porn web pages, most popularly Pornhub. Accordingly, there were more than 37,144 attempts to visit phishing versions of Pornhub, which was significantly higher than the 1,161 total attempts to visit fake versions of other porn sites.
Because these fake or spoofed websites look almost identical to the actual porn sites, users unsuspectingly entered their credentials. Not surprisingly, the rise in attacks has also resulted in a surge in the number of stolen porn credentials offered for sale on the dark web. The report went said:
Premium access credentials to porn websites might not seem like the most obvious thing to steal.However, the fact that the number of sales offers relating to such credentials on the dark web is rising, and the increased efforts to distribute such malware, shows that this is a profitable and popular line of illegal business.
Why porn sites are targets?
In the digital age, online pornography draws a lot of eyeballs because substantial content on porn websites is free. Therefore, it widens the potential audience for these kinds of websites but also increasing the number of those targeted with malware.
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