SINGAPORE – A report by INTERPOL on cybercrime in Southeast Asia has highlighted the key emerging cybercrime trends and threats which continues to be faced by the region today.
INTERPOL’s ‘ASEAN Cyberthreat Assessment 2020’ provides an in-depth analysis of the cybercrime trends and threats confronting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, and provides strategies for tackling them.
The INTERPOL ASEAN Cybercrime Operations Desk analysed data provided by INTERPOL’s private sector cybersecurity partners to identify the region’s top cyberthreats:
- Botnets – In the first half of 2019, there was an increase in botnet detections and hosting of Command and Control (C2) servers in the ASEAN region.
- Phishing – campaigns are increasing in both quantity and sophistication, using advanced social engineering techniques.
- Business email compromise (BEC) – ASEAN countries faced a growing number of BEC attacks.
- Banking malware – the first half of 2019 saw an increase in attacks compared to 2018.
- Ransomware – continues to grow and evolve in response to the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies.
- Cryptojacking – has emerged as a new threat due to the growing use of cryptocurrencies.
“To this end, we encourage law enforcement in all countries to be actively engaged in collective efforts against these threats, particularly through sharing intelligence and the formulation of a joint operation framework to effectively reduce the global impact of cybercrime,” he concluded.
Supporting police in the ASEAN countries in the fight against cybercrime, INTERPOL’s ASEAN Desk coordinated two recent regional operations. Operation Goldfish Alpha against cryptojacking led to a reduction of infected routers by 78 per cent, and Operation Night Fury against malware targeting e-commerce websites saw the arrest of three individuals suspected of controlling command servers in Indonesia.
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