Cybercriminals are growing more sophisticated because of their financial clout and access to the greatest expertise in the industry.

Even exploiting COVID-19 and Medicare texts and phone calls to defraud victims. How can illegal activity be stopped when the benefits vastly outweigh any fear of punitive measures taken by international institutions? We asked this question to Ankur Chandrakant, a recognized Cyber Security, and Forensic Expert with a deep understanding of Blockchain.

NFT, Crypto, and Metaverse, to which he replied that the effort to reduce cybercrime is nearing Pyrrhic dimensions.

With a 15% annual growth rate in returns thwarting any attempt to push this gang of criminals over the edge. They’re on track to grow their bounty by about $10.5 trillion by 2025 if they keep going at this pace. With no end in sight to the growth in cybercrime, you can try out some free IT security solutions. But investing in IT security may pay off far more than it costs.
We asked Ankur to tell us about the latest cybercrime trends. Which affect various industries, and he helped us with the same. Here’s what he said-

Phishing is a Pandemic

Phishing has always been common, and at one point it was the most serious cybersecurity threat of the year. Although security organizations have developed new strategies to prevent phishing assaults over the years, such as hardware-based authentication and fresh approaches to security-oriented training and awareness, phishing remains successful today and many people still fall victim to it.

However, owing to Covid-19, it has just become a serious concern once more. Cybercriminals have been using the epidemic narrative to spread panic and get people to hand over sensitive information. Another prominent type of phishing associated with the pandemic is spear phishing.

Email recipients will be tempted to click on sites that explicitly provide health advice/policies for telecommuting travelers.

Another strategy is effective. Hackers are replicating a Skype login screen to trick users into submitting their usernames and passwords under the false impression that they were connecting to a legitimate network. Cybercriminals have been so effective because they know a human mistake is at blame for 90% of data breaches. The phishing menace has risen to unprecedented heights. Every day, Google’s Threat Analysis Group blocks 18 million Covid-19-themed emails, including phishing links and malware downloads (Security Magazine, 2020).

Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) in Cybercrime

In cyberspace, artificial intelligence may be both a benefit and a burden. In the year 2040, AI is expected to conduct more cybercrimes than human people, thanks to the proliferation of IoT devices. For hackers, AI and IoT are rapidly making things simpler. Any gadget that can connect to the Internet is vulnerable to being hacked. And, with the rapid evolution of AI technology, IoT devices are encountering security challenges for which there appear to be no immediate answers. Even the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) has researched sophisticated AI applications for criminal justice and crime prevention. However, while AI has the potential to prevent and discourage crime, the risk lives in the system itself, which, if left alone with its machine-operated commands, may make up a worldwide security concern.

Crypto-jacking

Crypto-jacking is posing a threat to ransomware’s status as the most deadly cyber assault. Jacking is a type of malware that infects computers in order to mine bitcoin. It has surpassed ransomware on cybersecurity researchers’ watch lists. Several studies also show that most of today’s malware assaults are intended expressly for crypto-jacking, in which malicious code infects a device and then exploits the CPU to mine for bitcoin.

Crypto-jacking will continue to thrive in the future for three reasons:
a) The number of targets is in the billions. Many gadgets have already been compromised and are operating undetected.

b) It’s a straight payoff for a small amount of work. There are no further procedures required to get money, such as using data brokers or “crypto tumbling,” which is comparable to money laundering.

c) Data exfiltration is simply one step away from crypto-jacking. Crypto-jacking might readily grow into workable malware, piggybacking on sophisticated methods, once a foothold is gained within settings.

It also has the potential to develop into botnets for hire or data theft. Mining services and currency exchanges are at risk of being attacked in today’s cyber threat landscape, which is dominated by cryptocurrencies.

Crypto mining malware is frequent among cybercrime future trends because of the accessibility of crypto-jacking and the wide availability of attack tools. It is also intended to provide fraudsters with a low-risk money source.

Data Breaches

Data breaches occur regularly, and they are one of the most serious cyber risks today. The frequency of data breaches continues to rise year after year. Between January and September of this year, almost 7.9 billion data records were compromised. This was a 33 percent rise from the previous year.

Although enterprises have made initiatives to improve data security, data breach incidences are expected to rise in 2020. There was a 273 percent increase in events in the first quarter of 2020 alone. We may deduce from this that data breaches will almost certainly continue and may grow more severe in the future years.

Targeted Attacks

While targeted assaults aren’t exactly new in the world of cybercrime, they’re no less dangerous than other sorts of cyberattacks. Targeted attacks are malware built for certain sectors or businesses, and their ability to steal sensitive data has made them a big problem for most businesses.

The Asia-Pacific region had the most focused cyber assaults on business or internal networks in 2019. (75 percent). While Latin America did not see nearly as much cybercrime (25 percent), the region’s IT environments were hit the most in the eCommerce sector (75 percent) (Trustwave, 2020).

Brazil was the most targeted country in Latin America for cyberattacks the following year, with hackers affecting 55.97 percent of users. Meanwhile, healthcare organizations are becoming one industry most often targeted by malware this year. According to new information from Proofpoint US, a California-based business security solutions supplier, the medical industry was targeted by 77 percent of phishing emails in the first quarter of 2019. Malicious URLs masquerading as genuine emails were used in recent cybercrime trends in healthcare.

Bitcoin Popularity

As bitcoin gets more popular, ransomware becomes more prevalent. Bitcoin has also been identified as one of the most widely used ransom payment techniques to avoid detection by law authorities. Even while interest in other virtual currencies, such as monero, is increasing, bitcoin remains the most commonly encountered cryptocurrency in cybercrime investigations.

It might rise much higher than $12,902 soon.

Darknet thieves adopted it as their preferred money, resulting in a surge in bitcoin malware. In only one month in 2017, Malwarebytes, an anti-virus software business, had to thwart 250 million attempts to infect PCs with coin-mining malware.

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