As more consumers and devices connect to the internet, the risk of cybercrime is also growing, especially in the online retail industry which is valued at $525.5 billion in APAC alone.
With this in mind, ESET has listed its the top cybercrime trends and predictions for 2015.
First is that targeted attacks will continue to become more sophisticated this year.
“The attack vector for targeted attacks most commonly takes advantage of social engineering attacks,” said Pablo Ramos, head of the research lab at ESET Latin America. “Attacks also take the form of zero-day exploits, where attacks exploit newly discovered vulnerability on a particular operating system or application.”
Second, digital payment systems are expected to attract more malware.
“As users begin to adopt online payment systems as a means to pay for services and goods, these systems become more attractive to malware authors interested in financial gain,” said Ramos.
Last year saw the largest known digital payment attack to date, with a hacker reportedly harvesting more than $600,000 in Bitcoins and Dogecoins by using a network of infected machines.
ESET reported about attacks against the Dogevault site last May, and has also seen brute-force attacks — such as Win32/BrutPOS — that attempted to access password-protected accounts by hammering them with popular passwords to gain remote access.