Kaspersky experts discovered that cybercriminals launched more than 7 million attacks on children, specifically targeting popular game titles in 2022. In their latest report entitled “The dark side of kids’ virtual gaming worlds,” the cybersecurity solutions firm highlights the risks that young players face in online gaming. The report also revealed that focused attacks on this age group increased by 57% compared to the previous year.
Cybercriminals created phishing pages that mimicked global gaming titles such as Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Apex Legends games to target young players. These phishing pages were designed to evoke children’s interest and trick them into following the links and downloading malicious files. Additionally, cybercriminals created fake game sites that were aimed at parents, who were often unaware of the risks involved.
In the said report, Kaspersky experts analyzed threats related to the most popular online games for 3-16-year-old kids. Kaspersky security solutions detected more than 7 million attacks between January 2022 and December 2022. In 2021, cybercriminals attempted 4.5 million attacks, resulting in a 57 percent increase in attack attempts in 2022.
In 2022, 232,735 gamers encountered almost 40,000 files, including malware and potentially unwanted applications, that were disguised as the most popular children’s games. Since children of this age often do not have their own computers and play from their parents’ devices, the threats spread by cybercriminals are most likely aimed at obtaining the credit card data and credentials of the parents.
In the same period, nearly 40,000 users tried to download a malicious file, mimicking Roblox, a popular kids’ game platform. This resulted in a 14 percent increase in the number of victims, compared to 33,000 gamers attacked in 2021. Since half of Roblox’s 60 million users are under the age of 13, the majority of victims of these cybercriminals’ attacks are potentially children who lack knowledge of cybersecurity.
Kaspersky released 2022 statistics that showed cybercriminals primarily used phishing pages that mimicked popular games like Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Apex Legends to target young players. The report revealed that over 878,000 phishing pages were created for these four games alone.
One of the most common social engineering techniques used to target young players involves offers to download cheats and mods for games. Cybercriminals would provide a manual on how to install the cheat properly on the phishing site. It’s worth noting that the manual specifically instructs the user to disable their antivirus before installing the file, which could be a ploy to allow malware to avoid detection on the infected device. The longer the antivirus is disabled, the more information could potentially be collected from the victim’s computer.
“In 2022, cybercriminals even exploited games designed for 3-8-year-old children. This highlights that cybercriminals do not filter their targets by age and attack even the youngest gamers, with the likely target of reaching their parent’s devices. When focusing on young players, cybercriminals don’t even bother to make deception schemes less obvious. They hope children and teenagers have little or no experience or knowledge of cybercriminal traps and will easily fall for even the most primitive scams. Therefore, parents need to be especially careful about what apps their children download, whether their devices have trusted security solutions installed and should teach their children about how to behave online,” according to Vasily M. Kolesnikov, Security Expert at Kaspersky.
The full report on kids’ threats in online gaming worlds is available on KDaily.