During the pandemic a digital crimewave has flooded the internet

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WHERE REAL markets go, shadow markets often follow. In crime—as in legitimate economic activity—the pandemic has fostered an online boom. The Internet Crime Complaint Centre at America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reports that by June, daily digital crime had risen by 75% since the start of stay-at-home restrictions, and that the number of complaints received in 2020 had all but surpassed the total for 2019. In a new report, Interpol, an international policing body, corroborates these findings, tracking the same trend across member countries. “Cyber-criminals are developing and boosting their attacks at an alarming pace,” according to Jürgen Stock, its secretary-general, “exploiting the fear and uncertainty caused by the unstable social and economic situation created by covid-19.”

This surge has been driven by a dramatic shift online of many forms of economic activity because of the constraints of stay-at-home restrictions and social distancing. According to an index compiled by Adobe Analytics, a consultancy, online spending by American consumers was 76% higher in June than in the same month in 2019, and 55% up in July. Retail fraud has climbed similarly. By June 30th, the US Federal Trade Commission had received almost 140,000 reports since the start of the year, already nearly as many as in all the whole of 2019. And it had had more than 570,000 reports of identity theft—also almost as many as in all of last year—as criminals took advantage of the unfolding economic downturn and people’s general anxiety about the pandemic to exploit them for their personal information, credit-card numbers and banking details.

Criminals’ main method of attack on individuals has been covid-19-related email phishing—impersonating legitimate companies, often banks or credit-card companies, to dupe people into handing over log-ins, passwords or financial information. In recent months emails purporting to be from government and health-care authorities have proliferated, claiming to provide information and offer recommendations about the pandemic.

Often related to phishing attacks, the mushrooming of fraudulent websites and malicious domains has become a widespread problem in its own right. In June, Interpol’s Global Malicious Domain Taskforce identified and analysed more than 200,000 newly registered such sites. These affect more than 80 countries, and like phishing emails, are often designed to mimic official public websites, government portals, banks, and tax and customs authorities. They use the familiarity of trusted organisations to steal people’s personal information or to take payment for non-existent goods, services or government schemes.

Interpol’s cyber-crime division, however, reports that, as the pandemic has worn on, criminal networks have increasingly shifted their targets away from individuals and small businesses to big companies, governments and critical infrastructure. A particularly disruptive tool has been ransomware—hacking data and demanding money for their safe return—deployed against the infrastructure of corporations, government agencies, hospitals and medical centres already overwhelmed with the current health crisis.

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