It has been reported that one of the primary tactics recently being employed by cyber-criminals is to go after significantly smaller sums of money on a mass scale.
Some of the primary targets of this cyber-crime are home workers whose numbers have significantly increased as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In many instances, these individuals are losing sums of money as little as £10, reports Sky News.
The new trend – which has been labelled as “silent stealing” in a think-tank paper published by Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) – suggests that stealing larger sums of money is being ditched in favour of less conspicuous attacks. The research has suggested that, due to these smaller-scale thefts typically going unreported, it is often more ambiguous as to whether an incident is standalone or part of a wider criminal operation.
The report states: “There’s a working hypothesis that criminals are going down market.
“Yes, trying to steal £10m from a bank is an option, but stealing £10 a hundred thousand times is going to give you a good return and probably go below the radar. Are you going to call Action Fraud or your bank in the case where you lose £10?”
With a variety of phishing techniques being employed by attackers, Sneha Dawda, one of the authors, is advising people to be careful about what they share online and what they can do to protect themselves: “It’s probably down to a lot of awareness of the individual that they can identify a phishing email when they see one, that they double check before they click on links, that they don’t enter their login details when they’re even remotely suspicious that it’s not secure.
“It’s really about checking, checking and checking again before you do anything like giving out your details because cyber breaches are constantly happening, they expose a lot of information and simple things like a password manager and having unique secure passwords for each account that you have will minimise that risk of cyber criminals being able to take advantage of multiple accounts.”
Last month, RUSI warned that fraud had reached “epidemic levels” – to find out more information, visit: https://rusi.org/