E-Commerce Attacks Didn’t Increase During Coronavirus Quarantine

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people across the globe to stay at home. The quarantine has increased online shopping figures. Even though a majority of the people are shopping online for everything, from food to groceries to daily essentials, the web skimming attacks didn’t increase and are supposedly expected not to in the near time, due to it, say cybersecurity experts. Web skimming or Magekart attacks or e-skimming is a kind of cyberattack where the attacker inserts malicious codes in the online stores’ website. When the users make any payment in the checkout process while entering the data, the hackers steal their credit card credentials.

Web skimming attacks were famous amid the hackers during 2017-18 and had been rising since then. Various cybersecurity experts and agencies, when asked about ‘the impact of large scale online shopping on the web skimming incidents,’ they all agree that web skimming attacks will not rise just because more people are shopping now, spending most of their time online, while staying at home. It is because, for a very long time, hackers have tried to breach prominent e-commerce websites but have failed to do so, while the web skimming incidents have remained constant through the years.

According to these cybersecurity experts, there’s only one condition under which web skimming attacks can increase, and that is only when the number of online stores will increase can the hackers look for new sites to attack. Unless that happens, the rate of web skimming attacks will remain the same. According to the statistical analyses by Sanguine Security, the data shows that web skimming attacks have slightly fallen during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, not every cybersecurity agency agrees with this data.

But according to Jerome Segura, who is a web analyst at Malwarebytes, the web skimming attacks on online stores have not increased, therefore it confirms with Sanguine Security’s data. It may be because the number of online stores increased before 2-3 months, but nobody observed these attacks during that time. Another reason might be that buyers prefer shopping from popular e-commerce websites, which are hard to breach through for hackers.