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Emirates warns travellers against new phishing attack

Dubai - Emirates asked the UAE residents and travellers not to respond to such fake e-mails or open links given in these e-mails.

Emirates airline has alerted the travellers about a new phishing attack where fraudsters send an e-mail to people that their flight has been cancelled and they can claim the refund.

The Dubai-based world's largest international carrier asked the UAE residents and travellers not to respond to such fake e-mails or open links given in these e-mails.

"We've been alerted to recent email phishing attacks that contain the subject 'Your flight is cancelled: collect your refund'. These are not emails sent from Emirates.  Please be careful to protect your personal information and don't respond or click on links in such emails," it said in a statement posted its website.

"The easiest way to detect a fake e-mail is to look at the e-mail address it was sent from. All official e-mails from Emirates are sent from one of these two e-mail addresses: emirates@e.emirates.email or do-not-reply@emirates.email," it said.

Cyberattacks in the UAE and worldwide have increased since the outbreak of coronavirus as interenet traffic increased and companies and people increasingly moved towards online payments. In 2018, there was a year-on-year increase of 18.2 per cent in fraud cases in UAE and these numbers increased again last year.

Therefore, the UAE Central Bank, UAE Banks Federation, Dubai Police and Abu Dhabi Police launched first joint national fraud awareness campaign in April. The national fraud awareness campaign will run until the end of the year, focusing on different topics every month. These include SIM swap fraud, phishing, vishing, lottery scams, vanishing ink scams, card skimming, e-mail redirection fraud, and data privacy

The US-based cyber security and compliance company Proofpoint survey revealed that a majority (82 per cent) of CSOs and CISOs reported at least one cyberattack on their organisation in 2019 in the UAE, while over half (51 per cent) reported multiple incidents.

Account compromise was the leading method of cyberattack in the UAE in 2019, impacting 28 per cent of companies surveyed, followed by credential phishing (20 per cent) and insider threats (17 per cent). Almost one third of respondents (29 per cent) believe account compromise will continue to be the UAE's biggest cyber threat over the next three years, followed by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks (28 per cent) and phishing (19 per cent).

-waheedabbas@khaleejtimes.com