Cyber fraud: Phishers rob Air India passengers of Rs 16 lakh

Hyderabad: About 1.95 lakh passengers of Air India were affected recently when hackers broke into its loyalty scheme. They lost their passenger loyalty rewards worth Rs 16 lakh. A preliminary investigation by the Delhi police revealed that the hackers had phished the user details of frequent flyers.

Following this, cyber crime experts sounded an alert against phishing. Phishers trick Net users into submitting personal information to fake web sites.

Sytech Labs founder Sandeep Mudalkar, an ethical hacker and cyber crime consultant for TS and AP police, said: “Before approaching for payment, netizens must check whether the web link is genuine or phished. Mostly, cyber criminals target travel and movie ticket websites.”

“Phishing scams are usually presented in the form of spam or pop-ups and are often difficult to detect. After obtaining personal information, the hacker utilises it for all types of identity theft,”  Mudalkar said.

He cited the case of a Mumbai-based model who was defrauded by a Chandigarh-based teenager who had learnt tricks of hacking online. The Cyberabad cyber crime wing nabbed the teen.

He said that most e-commerce websites have employed tactics to fight phishing, but it was advisable that we are careful. “A major drawback with the ‘http’ format is that it is not well-protected. Anyone can hack the information between the networks and manipulate it. URLs with ‘https’ protocols (seen in the address bar) are considered secure. A secured protocol, through its Secured Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) encrypts and decrypts and locks information,” he said.

Mudalkar said most e-commerce sites offered the user multiple payment gateways. “Users can check the success rate under the payment gateway and can choose the best. Users must search for reviews and fraud cases on payment gateways before choosing one,”  he said and added that it was better to use a single payment gateway during online transactions.