With the ever-increasing technological development, people are switching their practices to digital. Some of the practices that have gone digital include:
- Banking
- Investment.
The developed criminal activities have made cyber security an important factor and necessity. Due to the huge amounts of money on the internet, a new crime wave has developed. This is for people investing or storing their money on the internet. People have fallen victim to hacking and lost many investments without their knowledge. This is due to a lack of cyber security protocols.
Phishing is a clever way of extracting information from people through technology. This is mainly done by sending people instructions to key in their login details. Hackers later use this info to access their information and extract all the details and funds from their accounts. The current number of victims being phished is alarming. According to one of the biggest antivirus companies in the world, Kaspersky, crypto phishing cases have been on the rise in the last few years. Antivirus has been able to help its clients.
From their data, their software has been able to identify and prevent around 200,000 phishing attempts in the last quarter. The phishing attempts blocked were meant to help the hackers steal digital currencies from their victims’ wallets. Among the 200,000 blocked phishing attempts, most of them were in April. This shows that the trend is increasing, and hackers are getting bolder. As a result, they have been able to steal millions or billions of dollars from their victims. The main thing targeted by these crypto phishing attempts is crypto wallets.
Wallets are a very lucrative target, considering the amount of money people hold as cryptocurrency. The wallets also serve as a common factor among many investors, thus, being a huge opportunity. Other than targeting crypto investors, phishing attempts on potential investors in cryptocurrency are common. These are people who research crypto investment. The phishing attempts trick them into thinking they can invest in the highlighted crypto wallet. Among the 200 000 attempts, Kaspersky identified 20 crypto wallets that were the most common among crypto phishing attempts.
The 20 included are the following:
- Electrum
- By bit
- CEX.IO
- Tezro
- eToro
- MetaTrader
- Paybis
- Jaxx
- Exodus
- Nash
- MetaMask
- Coinsmart
- Guarda
- Coinbase
- Wirex
- Gemini
- Binance
- Copay
- Coinmama
- YouHodle.
To conclude, Kaspersky advises any investor or person who wants to invest in cryptocurrency to install an antivirus on their computer. This will help protect them from phishing attempts. Crypto investment should begin with cyber security.
