Norton foiled over 1.95 lakh cyber attacks in a single day in India in January-March

Global cyber security services provider NortonLifeLock said on Wednesday that it has blocked more than 18,013,055 threats in India during the first three months of 2022 – which equates to about 195,794 per day.

Of these, 59,907 were phishing attempts and 31,062 were tech support scams, the company said, adding that cybercriminals were now defrauding victims by using deepfakes and crypto scams to access financial or personal information.

Globally, the company prevented more than a billion attacks during the three months ending March, that is, more than 11 million attacks per day.

NortonLifeLock highlights three different ways criminals were committing online scams globally – deepfakes, romance scams and crypto scams. It added that deepfakes are being used by bad actors to defraud consumers and spread misinformation. The Norton Labs team has observed deepfakes used to create fake social media profiles, fuel charity scams and other fraudulent tricks, and in addition to deepfakes used to create only funny videos, related to the ongoing war in Ukraine. propaganda has been spread.

Norton Labs also tracked $29 million in bitcoins stolen in 2021 and expects this figure to continue to rise in 2022 as the value of the crypto market rises and scammers are involved in the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine for stealing donations from philanthropic crypto investors. To capitalize on world events.

“New threats emerge as cybercriminals combine tactics. By presenting realistic misinformation via deepfakes in a phishing scam that collects payments in cryptocurrency, a consumer will have little or no recourse,” it said in a blog.

The third channel is a romance fraud that hunts down vulnerable people in search of love and connection. Fraudsters employ fake online identities to carefully select potential targets, often favoring victims who are recently widowed or divorced. Once scammers find a victim, they take the time to create the illusion of a romantic relationship in order to gain the victim’s trust and target them to manipulate and steal.

“Romance scammers are highly trained con artists; They know what to say to make the victim feel important and loved. As a result, these scammers can be very credible and convincing to the untrained eye,” it added.