Criminals use new technologies to violate the information of crypto-accounts and steal passwords. Users must check the authenticity of the pages they use in their devices.
Criminals in the digital world are attacking Latin American countries. Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru are the nations more affected by crimes such as Bitcoin rescues request, stealing crypto wallets and mining cyber-attacks.
“Internet users in Latin American countries are under the threat of different types of cyber-attacks every day”, commented the security company Eset, which conducted a study about that issue.
Cyber-crimes increase in a similar trend than cryptocurrency transactions. Peru is the country with the highest detection of cyberattacks related to crypto-mining in the region between January and September, according to Eset.
In this way, Peru has “11% of detections of computer crypto mining viruses”. Eset explained that private computers in that country are used illegally for cryptoactive mining in the Peruvian territory. Mexico is the second country with high levels of cyber-crimes. It has 10.6% of trend and Ecuador, the third country, has 9.8%.
The Reasons
Cyber-criminals use that modality to illegally use the resources of a computer or device, in order to execute algorithms that will allow obtaining cryptocurrencies.
During 2019, 44% of detections in Latin America originate in Javascript language. This implies that the infection starts on websites that use programming language. In fact, according to Eset, 24% of the infection comes from Windows devices.
Luis Lübeck, a computer security specialist at Eset Latin America, explained that cyber-criminals recognize websites with a large number of visitors. They take advantage of this to violate their security and introduce a code. The miner will run on the browser and the crypto-criminal will have access to the information of the user.
Another modality used by attackers is to attract users to download malicious programs on their computers or smartphone. For this, criminals use emails with suspicious links to achieve their terrible purpose.
New Forms of Attacks
Technological advances are also exploited by cyber-criminals. They take advantage of new devices and seek forms to be present where other users go.
Connected devices, which use the Internet of Things (IoT), have also been violated. The problem is that IoT computers do not reveal “symptoms” of infection to alert the user. This is according to what Lübeck explained.
“The user can’t tell if his webcam, smart TV or router is slower. They access from stolen user credentials”, he said.
Another Numbers
Recently, the technological services firm CompariTech gave information about the countries that are more and less prepared to cyber-attacks and which countries are more susceptible to cyber-criminals.
Among the countries most vulnerable to cyber-attacks are Belgium, Dominican Republic, Samoa, China, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, South Africa, and Australia.
The average cost of cyber-crime in the world is as follows: United States $ 17.36 million, Japan $8.39 million, Germany $ 7.84 million, United Kingdom $ 7.21 million, Brazil $ 5.27 million, and Australia with $ 4.3 million.
Currently, the countries which are best prepared for cyber-attacks are Canada, the United States of America, Brazil, Norway, Germany, Estonia, Oman, New Zealand, and Malaysia.
Users must try to avoid using browsers or Apps little known and also must avoid opening suspicious emails. Additionally, they must be sure to use secure and official websites, reading first the address of the page, in order to protect their vital information.
By María Rodríguez
