Emerging Trends in Cybercrime
Technology is advancing every single day and hacking is no different. Everyday companies are attacked with hackers in their systems, and they pay ransoms amount of money to get full control of their systems. In most cases, some companies end up losing everything in their organization systems. Cybercrime has grown to be one of the most significant threats facing big companies today. For instance, Travelex, a UK Foreign exchange company, was forced to pay up to $2.3 million in bitcoin to get full control of their systems from hackers. From this recent incident, we have seen cybercrime has taken a new turn of event. As new technology trends emerge, new trends are also appearing in the cybercrime sector. Cybercrime is among the first growing crimes in the US, and they are increasing in cost to the business.
One of the emerging cybercrime trends is attacks through smartphones
and home computers. Vendors and people involve themselves with unsafe browsing with their smartphones. Accessing and visiting different sites has made vendors and people who carry on huge transaction a prey to hackers. Hackers today will write blogs, articles post them in different websites where they will trap their prey. According to research conducted by RSA security, it is estimated more than 60% of the fraud line is accomplished through handsets. The research also estimated that an estimate of 80% mobile fraud is achieved through the installation of mobile apps and accessing unsafe mobile webs. Mobiles frauds have been on the rise because most people use their handset to manage their financial operations and handle others sensitive information outside the security of their home network.
Besides attacks via smartphones, phishing has remained to be one of the successful cybercrime attacks since most of the phishing sites stay online for up to five hours. Today its only 17% of phishing attacks are reported by users, and only a third of the URLs online can be trusted by users. This poses the risk of been attacked by cybercrime so high. Advanced phishing kits that are available in the dark web has grown to become the most dangerous way of attacking users on the web today.
Another emerging trend is remote access. Today remote access attacks cases have increased significantly. Example of remote access attacks is crypto-jacking which is used in attacking cryptocurrency owners. Remote access has grown to be the easiest way for hackers to attack users since they target computers, internet protocol cameras, smartphones, and network-attached storage devices since these tools usually need to be connected with external networks or the internet.
In addition to the three trends in cybercrime, email spams have also grown to be a new way of attacking targeted users. An estimate of more than six billion spam emails are sent every day. Despite the range of opportunities created with the advancement in technology, it also poses greater threats from cybercrime. For instance, the roll-out of 5G mobile technology will transform the internet communication and allow billions of new devices to be online. For the business world, rolling out of 5G will create more opportunities for them. However, with the rolling out of 5G, more emerging trends in cybercrime will emerge with new devices added in the networks. However, 5G will enable organizations to restructure their cybersecurity strategies accordingly.
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