Forty percent of U.S. consumers fall victim to online  phishing attack , despite 91% being aware of the existence of spoofed websites or emails of trusted brands, according to a new report.

Seattle-based domain name and DNS-based cyber threat intelligence firm DomainTools, revealed in its 2017 Cyber Monday Phishing Survey, 92% of all consumers shop online and about half are planning to shop online on Cyber Monday, exposing an opportunity for malicious hackers to strike.

"Cyber Monday has grown in popularity year over year, and unfortunately, so has phishing and online counterfeiting,” Tim Chen, CEO of DomainTools said. He added, a range of techniques trick shoppers into visiting a fake website or clicking on a malicious link. This can result in a shopper unintentionally sharing financial and personal information with these criminals or even downloading ransomware. "As shoppers search for Cyber Monday deals, it's important that they remember to look closely at links and email addresses before clicking. If something seems too good to be true, it may instead be very fake and very bad."

The Anti-Phishing Working Group reported the detection of nearly 119,000 unique phishing sites during November 2016, with over 300 individual brands targeted. The brands with the most spoofable websites this November likely correspond with the most popular online retailers, which include Amazon (82%), Walmart (36%), and Target (20%).

DomainTools suggested consumer education remains the number one way to prevent compromises via phishing. Online shoppers should heed these tactics to safely navigate links to Cyber Monday sales shared via email and social media:

1. Be paranoid.  Assume links are dangerous until decided otherwise.
2. Navigate directly to a company's website  instead of clicking on links in emails or social media.
3. Closely examine URLs and email senders for typos.  Examples could include: extra added letters in the domain, such as Yahooo[.]com, 'rn' disguised as an 'm', such as modem[.]com versus modern[.]com, 1's disguised as l's, such as wa1mart[.]com, and added affixes, such as starbucks[.]com-latte[.]us