The Rise Of Cybercrime Amid COVID-19
As a frequent internet user, you run the risk of being infected with worms, trojans, viruses, adspy, and other malware or encountering suspicious hyperlinks, e-mails, attachments, or messages. Therefore, it’s important to keep track of how you use the internet since the latency of threats that can infiltrate your digital device can be extremely disruptive, or careless clicks on malicious content can result in phishing. Nonetheless, the pandemic has altered the way we live, research, and engage in other activities. As a result, our activities are mostly focused on the internet, which exposes threat actors to a greater degree.
However, the threats seem to be more worrying since very few people, especially those who handle sensitive and critical data, are aware of effective cybersecurity training. According to a report by Badan Siber dan Sandi Negara(BSSN), cybercrime appears to be increasingly rising during the pandemic, compared to 2019 — when Covid-19 had not yet arrived in Indonesia.
Before we go any further, let’s define cybercrime. Is it a criminal activity that you see in the newspapers or on television every day? … The answer is that it is undoubtedly a criminal activity, but there is a distinction to be made between cybercrime and conventional criminal activity. The use of digital computers is one aspect of cybercrime that stands out. In other words, cybercrime is the use of a computer to cause damage to individuals or organizations.
However, similar to many other types of criminal activity that took place around us. As many conventional processes such as transactions, file delivery, and so on have shifted to digital processes, cybercrime now poses more threats.
When it comes to cybercrime forms, computer crime and computer-related crime are two distinct types of cybercrime. Many crimes, such as illegal interception (unsolicited transmission to computer systems), web defacement (altering the visual appearance of a webpage without the legality), and system interference (hindering the functionality of a computer system by inputting, transmitting, damaging, deteriorating, altering, or suppressing computer data) can all be classified as computer crimes (tweaking, altering, modifying the critical data).
Meanwhile, computer-related crimes such as online pornography, online gambling, online defamation, online extortion, online fraud, hate speech, online threats, illegal access, and data theft use the computer as an additional helper to offer or distribute information/illegal possession.
Now, we have gained a basic understanding of cybercrime. A lot of cybercrime has happened throughout this pandemic and there’s Patroli Siber — a website that offers statistics on cybercrime and is run by Direktorat Tindak Pidana Siber(Dittipidsiber). During the pandemic era(2020–2021), civilians reported 2259 incidents to police, with the most common being the dissemination of provocative contents (1048), followed by online scams (649), pornography (208), illegal access (138), data manipulation (71), data/identity theft (39), gambling (32), Illegal Interception(24), extortion (19), System Hacking (18), Web defacement (9), and system crashes (4).
Throughout this pandemic, several Android apps that were supposed to assist people with Covid-19 were hacked. Spyware called Joker Android Malware was detected by BSSN inside a validated Google Play Covid-19 trackers. BSSN suggested we use government/police-verified Covid-19 trackers. Not only that, the application for online video-conferencing that is used for work meetings, education, and other conference purposes was also hijacked. Malicious zoom meetings that were attached by malware uses an encoding that contains Metasploit modules, adware, and hiddenad / hiddad.
Back to the beginning, we know the harm that these threats can do to your device or your data can be disruptive and instead, benefit the threat actors. So, here are some pointers on how to reduce the chances of coming into contact with these threats.
- Use ad-blocking software. Advertisements may be used as a medium for spreading malware. Adblocker can block such ads from appearing on the internet. Be sure to use a secure ad-blocker, however.
- For security diagnostics on the websites you’re accessing, go to this Google page. The website address should be copied and pasted or typed into the field, then click on the magnifying glass icon. The website will then show a security diagnostic report of the website you entered.
- For accounts, create a unique password that avoids using your date of birth, or personal information. Avoid using incremental letters or numbers in your password. Threat actors would be less likely to gain access to our data if we apply all of those. Having different passwords for every application also decreases the chance for threat actors to access our data altogether.
- Always use 2-factor authentication.
- Double-check the website details that require filling data start from the web address and makes sure the website is legit. When making a purchase, always use a secure Internet connection. Credible websites encrypt data during transmission using technologies like SSL (Secure Socket Layer) to reduce the chance of hackers and identity thieves stealing or tampering with sensitive information (such as credit card numbers, usernames, passwords, e-mails, and so on).
- Be cautious of third-party applications that ask for your permission to access your data. If we missed out, the worst thing that can happen is our data leaked.
- Keep your software and applications up-to-date.
- Use an antivirus. Antivirus is really helpful to detect malware that can harm your computer.
Because of the dramatic rise in cybercriminal activity, we might be warier of potential threats to our devices. However, If you carefully proceed on the internet, you’ll have a better chance of thwarting those threat actors. So, be careful with your devices!
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Works cited:
https://patrolisiber.id/statistic
https://bssn.go.id/rekap-serangan-siber-januari-april-2020/
https://teknologi.id/insight/tips-melindungi-data-versi-badan-siber-dan-sandi-negara-bssn
