Cybercrime to Surge in Cryptocurrency Even in Post COVID-19 Economy

According to a report by Kaspersky Lab about cybersecurity and antivirus, in the post-COVID-19 world, crimes related to cryptocurrency are still likely to grow. Kaspersky’s cyberthreat research team, Securelist, published a report regarding the cybercrimes in financial institutions and they predicted some kind of financial attacks that can occur in 2021. 

According to Secularist, in the post-COVID world, there will be an increase in poverty as the world’s economy is going down the hill. This will further result in people turning towards the means of crimes to fulfill their essential needs. This can also increase crime related to digital currency. 

Securelist also predicts that bitcoin can end up being the most crime affected currency and an asset for cybercriminals on account of being the most famous digital currency. “ We might see certain economies crashing and local currencies plummeting, which would make Bitcoin theft a lot more attractive. We should expect more fraud, targeting mostly BTC, due to this cryptocurrency being the most popular one.”

The research also recommended that criminals could turn to more privacy-focused digital currency as well like Monero (XRM). The research states that this switch could occur because of the technical ability of monitoring and deanonymization of BTC.

“We should expect cybercriminals to switch to transit cryptocurrencies for charging victims. There is a reason to believe they might switch to other privacy-enhanced currencies, such as Monero, to use these first as a transition currency and then convert the funds to any other cryptocurrency of choice including BTC.”

Crimes related to crypto have lessened in 2020 but some sectors like decentralized finance have become a new target for criminals.