Kaspersky's anti-phishing systems prevented 5 million cryptocurrency-related phishing attacks in 2022. This is a 40 percent increase over the previous year. Conversely, there was a decrease in the detection of traditional financial threats, such as banking and mobile financial malware. These and other findings can be found in the company's latest report on financial threats.
According to a new report from Kaspersky, the landscape of financial threats has changed significantly by 2022. While attacks involving traditional financial threats such as banking, PC and mobile malware have become less common, cybercriminals have shifted their focus to new areas, including the crypto industry.
In the past year, cryptocurrency phishing increased significantly and was included as a separate category, growing 40 percent each year with 5,040,520 detections of crypto phishing in 2022 compared to 3,596,437 in 2021. This increase in crypto phishing could be partly explained by the havoc that occurred in the crypto market last year. It is still unclear whether the trend will continue, as it depends on the trust users place in cryptocurrency. This data correlates with users' experiences with surveyed cryptocurrency threats earlier this year. Every seventh person surveyed was affected by cryptocurrency phishing.
While most crypto-frauds involve traditional tricks such as giveaway frauds or phishing pages with fake wallets, a recent actively fraudulent trick shows that scammers are constantly inventing new techniques to ensure their success. In this campaign, the user receives by mail a PDF file in English, stating that he allegedly registered long ago on a cryptocurrency cloud mining platform and urgently needs to withdraw a lot of crypto because his account is inactive. The file contains a link to a fake mining platform. To withdraw the crypto, the user must fill out a form with personal information, including card or account number, and pay a commission, in this case through a cryptowallet or directly to the wallet address provided.
An example of active crypto fraud that took place in February 2023
"Despite some problems that have occurred in the cryptocurrency market over the past six months, crypto still remains in the minds of many people as a symbol of getting rich quick with minimal effort. Therefore, the flow of scammers parasitizing this field is not drying up. To lure victims into their networks, these scammers keep coming up with new and more interesting stories," said Olga Svistunova, security expert at Kaspersky.
Learn more about the state of financial threats in 2022 at Securelist.com.
