Category: Children

A concerning trend has emerged, revealing the extent to which criminals perpetrating ransomware attacks are willing to go to extract money from their victims. Charles Carmakal, CEO of Mandiant, now under Google’s ownership, highlighted one such alarming scenario during the Google Security Threat Intelligence Panel at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

According to Carmakal, the situation has escalated as cybercriminals resort to SIM swapping, a technique involving the unauthorized transfer of a victim’s phone number to a new SIM card, to target children’s phones. Subsequently, they use these compromised devices to contact the children’s parents and issue threats to coerce them into paying ransom.

This tactic is a form of psychological manipulation aimed at pressuring victims into compliance. One particularly sinister approach involves calling corporate executives from their children’s phone numbers and threatening dire consequences unless a ransom is paid promptly.

Termed Caller ID Spoofing, this method involves cloning a victim’s SIM card to impersonate them and make fraudulent calls. Cybercriminals fabricate convincing narratives to intimidate victims, leveraging emotional connections to increase the likelihood of ransom payment, often in cryptocurrency.

Imagine the distress of receiving a call seemingly from your child while engrossed in a meeting. The psychological impact of such a scenario can tilt the odds in favor of the hacker, compelling the victim to pay to safeguard their child’s privacy.

In typical ransomware attacks on mobile devices, attackers steal contacts and threaten to expose sensitive information such as photos, messages, and contacts unless a ransom is paid. However, in attacks targeting corporate environments, C-level executives become prime targets for Caller ID spoofing tactics.

In addition to the threat posed by encrypted databases, the risk of stolen data being leaked online looms large in such attacks. Seeking assistance from law enforcement and adhering to cybersecurity experts’ recommendations to mitigate these risks remains the most viable solution.

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In January of this year, the UK police disclosed that some schools in Ghana were teaching school kids above the age of 10 to catfish single women from Britain and engage in romance scams with them, exploiting them for money exchange.

The issue was brought to light when a team of journalists from a reputed daily engaged in an undercover operation to unravel the people behind catfishing. To their surprise, they found a few school children groomed with cyber lessons to smartly coax males and females from developed nations into engaging in such embarrassing activities that they had no choice but to pay the hacker a hefty amount to avoid any online embarrassment.

Now, authorities in the UK have issued an advisory to the Ghanaian Police on the damage caused by romance scams and how to prevent children from being groomed into catfishing and other activities such as defrauding people in Britain.

Nik Adams is leading the response against fraud and has stipulated certain preventive guidelines to school-going would-be hackers on how to not fall prey to online hackers and fraudsters and target wealthy single women, as it can lead to serious legal consequences.

As this crime and related crimes are seeing a sharp rise in and around London, the police authorities contacted the Ghanaian government with a scheme to increase the morale of people, especially children, to speak out against crime and its perpetuation.

Note 1: Catfishing is nothing but luring an online victim into a relationship with a fake profile and then engaging in the crime of extortion, which can lead to the death of the victim under certain circumstances.

Note 2: For the past few weeks, a new WhatsApp scam has emerged on the web, where scammers from countries like Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam are calling victims to gain personal information or to win their trust in order to take the romance scam to the next level. As per the analysis conducted by South Indian Police officials, people as young as teens are being hired to engage the victims in scams and are being lured with hefty paychecks on a monthly basis.

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A recent survey made by a Saudi based firm has discovered that about 72% of children were hit by cyber threats last year, i.e., 2021 and estimates are in that there can be a rise by 10% in such attacks by this year’s end.

Saudi based Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in association with Global Cybersecurity Forum (GCF) indulged in a survey to find why children are unsafe online and discovered that most of them were vulnerable to hackers as they reveal more than intended information online.

It was detected in the survey, Children aged 8 and more were using internet on an active note and were being targeted by ads that were inappropriate and contained content related to harassment, bullying and what wasn’t meant for the young minds to see.

The survey that was conducted across 24 countries involving 40,000 parents and an equal number of children, highlighted the fact that there is an urgent need for a global action on a collective note, as children were been exposed to constant cyber threats in this rapidly developing cyberspace.

A large majority of children (say 83%) from the Middle East and Latin America were being exposed to the highest number of threats and among them, more than half of them admitted they were feeling threatened to go online for reasons.

Conversely, over 53% of parents say that their child might have never experienced such threats as they did not reveal any such thing to them. But the GCF claims that many might have stayed silent as they did not know whether to report such incidents or weren’t aware that the experience they met was harassment.

What’s even more concerning is the fact that children aged 10 and above were using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and businesses are still failing to filter such young age users from using their services, despite of their sincere efforts.

Covid pandemic ejected the severity of the issue as more school going children were exposed to online hackers, all because of their online classes. And this made difficult for the law enforcement to protect young minds from many criminals lurking online.

So, parents, caregivers, guardians, teachers are being urged to keep a vigil on their students and children and protect them from online abuses by taking help of various technologies.

The GCF is planning to hold a summit on this topic in the Kingdom of Riyadh on November 9th and 10th of this year and will head it with the theme ‘Rethinking the Global Cyber Order’.

 

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