Social Engineering is a form of security fraud that relies on psychological manipulation techniques to trick people into revealing sensitive information. In the previous article in this series, we discussed what social engineering is in more detail, the social engineering lifecycle, its reliance on human error, and some of the more common social engineering techniques.

In a recent Quarterly Index report, Netacea’s Threat Research Team listed the top five scalper bot targets of Q3 2021 and predicted the items most sought after by bots for Black Friday and the festive shopping season. But scalper bots (or grinch bots) have already been hard at work ahead of Christmas, depriving genuine consumers of luxury advent calendars and limited-edition toys in the run up to peak retail period.

Social Engineering is a form of security fraud that relies on psychological manipulation techniques to trick people into revealing sensitive information. This is often carried out online using a variety of social engineering techniques; one of the more commonly referred to social engineering attacks are phishing attacks (including, vishing, smishing, spear phishing and whale phishing).

Online travel agencies, more commonly referred to as OTAs, are online booking platforms used to compare prices and book flights, hotels or holiday packages. Well-known OTAs include Expedia, Booking.com and TripAdvisor. While we have seen a significant increase in the use of OTAs for booking travel arrangements in recent years, we have also seen a similar rise in OTA fraud. Total fraud loss to OTAs was predicted to grow by 19% to $25 billion by the year 2020.