Global cybersecurity services provider NortonLifeLock has said that they have blocked more than 18,013,055 cyber security threats during Q1 2022 in India. It was equivalent to blocking about 195,794 cyberattacks per day. Of these, 59,907 were phishing attempts, and 31,062 were tech support related scams, the company said in a blog.
It also pointed out that cybercriminals were now deceiving victims using deep fakes and cryptocurrency-related scams to access financial and personal information.
NortonLifeLock said that globally they have blocked more than a billion attacks in Q1 2022 or 11 million attacks per day. They said that criminals were globally running scams of three broad types - deep fakes, romance scams and crypto scams. Deep fakes are created using machine learning and artificial intelligence to scam consumers and spread disinformation.
“Romance fraud is a particularly sinister type of scam that preys on vulnerable people looking for love and connection. Scammers adopt fake online identities to carefully select potential targets, often favoring recently widowed or divorced victims. Romance scammers are highly trained con artists; they know exactly what to say to make the victim feel important and loved. As a result, these scammers can be very believable and convincing to the untrained eye,” Norton said in its blogpost.
The Norton Labs team has also spotted deep fakes being used to create fake social media profiles, run charity scams and other fraudulent scams. Deep fakes are also being used in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia War, it added.
Norton Labs said that in 2021 alone they have tracked $29 million in Bitcoin (BTC) being stolen, and expects this figure to rise further in 2022. This is because crypto scammers are trying to capitalise on world events like the Russia-Ukraine War, and crypto donations, among others.
“New threats emerge as cybercriminals combine tactics. By presenting realistic disinformation via deep fakes in a phishing scam that collects payment in cryptocurrency, a consumer would have little to no recourse,” read the blogpost by Norton.
There has been an increased crimes related to crypocurrencies and recently blockchain based decentralised gaming platform Axie Inifinity too was hacked. Click here to read more about that.
