Each week about 57,000 websites are booby-trapped by hackers. All of the sites are seemingly legitimate too.
Hackers usually make the online traps to look like different versions of shopping websites, according to AFP. The cyber criminals will use email and social networks to shoot out their links in order to get the sties into the search engine. The purpose of these rigged sites is usually to get the user to put in their personal information or to slip viruses into the user's computer.
A Spain-based security team called PandaLabs compiled a list of the top 10 companies that were impersonated which included Visa, Amazon, Paypal and the US Internal Revenue Service. The most commonly chosen sites to be impersonated were eBay and the money transfer service called Western Union. Those two sites accounted for 20 percent of the research done by PandaLabs over a three-month span.
When visiting online stores or banking websites, PandaLabs recommends that you type the web address into the browser, rather than going through a search engine.
