Cyber Attack Targeting Young Gamers Up 57 Percent In 2022

Phishing in the game targets children (photo: Roblox)

JAKARTA - The latest report by Kaspersky experts entitled The Dark Side Of Kids Virtual Gaming Worlds reveals the risks for young players in playing online games.

According to the report, phishing pages used by cybercriminals to target young players mostly mimic global titles such as Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Apex Legends games. In total, more than 878,000 phishing pages were created for these four games in 2022

In the same report, Kaspersky experts analyzed the threat related to online games targeting children aged 3-16 years at most. In 2022 alone, Kaspersky's security solutions detected more than 7 million attacks.

When compared to 2021, cybercriminals carried out 4.5 million more attacks, so this number increased by 57 percent in 2022.

In 2022 alone, there are 232,735 players who have found nearly 40,000 files, including potentially dangerous malware and applications disguised as the most popular children's games.

In the same period, nearly 40,000 users tried to download malicious files, which mimics Roblox, a popular children's gaming platform. This resulted in a 14 percent increase in the number of victims, compared to the 33,000 gamers attacked in 2021.

For Indonesia in particular, the affected users reached 1279 out of 11294 cases of infection detected during 2022. Because half of the 60 million Roblox users under the age of 13, the majority of victims of cybercriminals' attacks have the potential to be children who lack cybersecurity knowledge.

One of the most common social engineering techniques targeting young players involves offering to download popular cheats and mods for games. On phishing sites, users may get complete guidance on how to install cheats properly.

The most interesting finding is that there are specific instructions stressing the need to disable antivirals before installing files. This may not be suspicious for young players, but it might be made specifically so that malware can evade detection on infected devices.