Kaspersky experts found that cybercriminals carried out more than 2022 million attacks against children using the name of popular games in 7. Kaspersky's latest report titled “The dark side of kids' virtual gaming worlds” reveals the risks posed by online gaming for young gamers and a 2021 percent increase in targeted attacks against this age group compared to 57. put it.
In the report, Kaspersky experts analyzed the threats on popular online games that children aged 3-16 are most interested in. Kaspersky security solutions observed more than 2022 million attacks between January 2022 and December 7. In 2021, cybercriminals attempted 4,5 million attacks in this area, while in 2022, these similar attack attempts increased by 57%.
In 2022, 232 gamers encountered nearly 735 files, including malware disguised as popular children's games and potentially unwanted applications. Since children this age often don't have their own computers and play games with their parents' devices, threats spread by cybercriminals are likely aimed at hijacking parents' credit card data and credentials.
Distribution of the 10 most popular kids' games used as bait for the distribution of malware and unwanted software, by number of affected users.
In the same period, approximately 40 thousand users tried to download malicious files by imitating Roblox, a popular children's game platform. This resulted in a 2021% increase in the number of victims compared to the 33 players hacked in 14. Half of Roblox's 60 million users are under the age of 13, revealing that the majority of victims of cybercriminals are children who are potentially uninformed about cybersecurity.
“Scammers roam the virtual worlds of children”
According to Kaspersky statistics, phishing pages used by cybercriminals to target young players specifically impersonated Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Apex Legends. In total, more than 2022 thousand phishing pages were created for these four games in 878.
One of the most common social engineering techniques aimed at young gamers involves offers to download popular cheats and mods for games. The user is redirected to the malicious phishing page for guidance on how to properly install the cheat.
What is particularly interesting here is that before uploading the file, special instructions are shared with the children on how to disable the antivirus on the computer. It contains a specially created directive to prevent this malware from being detected on the device, and teens may not realize what they are doing when applying it. The longer the user's antivirus program is disabled, the more information is collected from the victim's computer.
Kaspersky Security Specialist Vasily Kolesnikov said:
“In 2022, we observed cybercriminals exploiting even games designed for children aged 3-8. This shows that cybercriminals do not filter their targets by age and attack even tiny gamers by aiming to reach their parents' devices on which they play games. While cybercriminals focus on young gamers, they don't even bother to make their deception plans less obvious. They hope that children and young people have little experience or knowledge of the pitfalls of cybercrime, and will fall prey to even the most primitive scams. Therefore, parents need to be especially careful about which apps their children download and whether they have reliable security solutions installed on their devices, and they need to teach their children how to behave online.”