You often receive messages showing “lucky draw you win this year” or “if you want to get a gift voucher, click here”. We all go through these things in our daily life, but, do you know the actual mechanism behind this effort? Humans achieved more advancement to use technology for their advantage eitherpositively or negatively. Click hijacking is just another illegal way for thieves to get money from your pocket very smartly.
This article provides some information about click hijacking and its types as awareness about technology is so important to protect yourself from unknown attackers/hackers.
What is Click hijacking fraud?
- Click hijackerswants to trick the users, so they unknowingly click an invisible web page. Some website developers and HTML experts use their skills to attach unwanted websites or buttons behind the visible website, and when you click that site, you are allowing them to access your data. There are many ways to use the click hijacking technique; some of them are discussed below:
- Scroll fraud: Attackers usually use this technique to make you allow a specific warning. The actual warning is to hide behind some usual text or position the warning box in a way that you can only see yes or no buttons.
- Overlay inside: This is the most used trick by the attackers. They create a small pixel under your cursor, so you can’t see the whole information. But remember even a single click can make your life problematic.
- Cropping: This method is used to hide your website buttons with transparent links that you can predict a very innocent webpage and click the buttons, which can lead you to further wrong content. They sometimes use hijacking ad fraudsby giving you attractive offers. It may cause unwanted ad floods on your browser.
What is attribution fraud?
It is similar to click hijacking where attackers want to take credits to install the app by fake clicks. A malware that can detect your activity of installing an app cause attribution fraud. They convert that click to generate many related apps and takes the installation credit. When a user clicks to install, the malware generates lots of fake clicks which may result” last-click” model, which counts as the first engagement of this app with you.
What is the importance of understanding hijacking?
To protect yourself from these kinds of technological tricks, you must understand how do they work. A proper content security policy is important to ensure the directives are not providing double domaining from the same website. Detection and prevention of these frauds are easy by using only registered website and take immediate action on any unusual activity. There are many methods from which you can detect the fake content or mysterious functioning behind it. For Example, X-frame options, this frame is made by Microsoft and first introduced in Internet Explorer 8. It can check if a specific website you want to open has any element that may cause hijacking. It is highly recommendable for the detection and prevention from all types of fraud.
That does not end here, click to know more about what is click hijacking.
