Akamai’s report sheds light on the escalating trend of cybercriminals deceiving victims by posing as the United States Postal Service (USPS) through increasingly violent tactics. The fraudulent domains attempting to mimic USPS have seen a significant surge in usage.
The Akamai team has been investigating the traffic rates of these deceptive websites by searching for domains with the USPS name, only to find that they resolve to IP addresses that are not owned by USPS. Examples of such deceptive domains include usps-post[.]world, uspspost[.]me, and usps-postoffices[.]top. These domains resolve to IP addresses controlled by malicious actors, who sometimes use slightly different domain names. Some servers even host thousands of such fraudulent domains.
When comparing the DNS query rates between legitimate domains and the fraudulent domains of cybercriminals, it was discovered that the overall query rates are very similar. At certain points, such as the end of 2023, the fraudulent domains had even higher query rates compared to the authentic USPS domains, likely due to the high volume of holiday shipments.
Source: Akamai
TLDR: Akamai’s investigation reveals a concerning rise in cybercriminals impersonating USPS with fraudulent domains, with query rates often surpassing those of the legitimate USPS domains.
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