APAC Should Brace For Increased Phishing, Scams And Data Breaches In 2024: Kaspersky

Motivated by geopolitical factors, these threats are expected to persist, targeting both organisations and individuals in APAC region.

Growing popularity of micro-loan apps has resulted in new schemes to target users in India.

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Fueled by the rapid digitalisation in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region and prevailing geopolitical tensions, cybersecurity threat landscape in 2024 will witness increased threats such as phishing, scams, data breaches and cyberattacks, anti-virus provider and cybersecurity major Kaspersky sad on Thursday. Motivated by geopolitical factors, these threats are expected to persist, targeting both organisations and individuals in the region.

What Scams Are On The Prowl In India 

India has been traditionally suffering from a range of low-skill, but high-scale scam and fraud cases. Typical threats prevalant in India include, illegal or fake digital loan apps, income tax refund services, real estate fraud, investment scam, online ponzi schemes, job fraud and sextortion.

“The rise of technologies and digitalisation of the Indian economy, such as increased use of the sophisticated Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the software from the National Payments Corporation of India, will lead to a wave of related scams. Another opportunity for scammers is the ever-rising popularity of cryptocurrencies, which may lead to a new generation of scam apps,” Vitaly Kamluk, Head of Research Centre for Asia Pacific, Global Research and Analysis Team (GReAT) at Kaspersky, said in a statement.

Also, a growing popularity of micro-loan apps has resulted in new schemes to target users in India through unexpected inflated premiums and personal threats. In addition, with India’s move towards smart cities, IoT vulnerabilities pose serious security challenges for the country.

“Asia Pacific’s digital economy continues to grow exponentially and is expected to keep its momentum in the next five years. With digitalisation efforts including adoption of technologies like digital payments, Super Apps, IoT, smart cities, and now generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), cybersecurity will be key to ensuring the resilience of the region’s overall defenses against potentially damaging cyberattacks,” Kamluk noted.

“When it comes to sophisticated Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), we have seen that cyber espionage remains to be the main objective of Asian groups. We expect this trend to continue in 2024 due to the existing geopolitical tensions in the region,” Kamluk added.

Scale Of Scams In Southeast Asia

According to a report by the UN, hundreds of thousands of people from Southeast Asia (SEA) were recruited to join online-scam operations such as romance-investment scams, crypto fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling. Recruitment to these criminal operations are mostly done via advertised professional roles such as programmers, marketers or human resource specialists, through what appear to be legitimate and even elaborate procedures. 

Increased usage and trust in digital payment methods, lack of regulations protecting the rights of users online and large numbers of people forced into joining online-scam operations add complexity to this major issue in SEA and in resolving it.