MINECRAFT and Roblox fans have been warned to watch out for fake web pages used to spread malicious files.
Hackers often piggybank on popular brands to lure people in and experts are now concerned about children being targeted.
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Kaspersky has revealed that cybercriminals launched more than 7million attacks on children last year by exploiting popular titles.
That’s a 57 per cent increase compared to 2021.
The vast majority of these so-called phishing pages ripped off Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, and Apex Legends games.
In total, over 878,000 phishing pages were created for these four in 2022 alone.
Almost 40,000 users apparently tried to download a malicious file mimicking Roblox, which is particularly popular among kids.
Criminals get them in by offering downloads to cheats and mods.
On a phishing site the user may get a whole manual on how to install the cheat properly.
And it usually asks them to turn off any antivirus software before they can install it.
“In 2022, cybercriminals even exploited games designed for 3-8-year-old children,” said Vasily M. Kolesnikov, a security expert at Kaspersky.
“This highlights cybercriminals do not filter their targets by age and attack even the youngest gamers, with the likely target of reaching their parent’s devices.
“When focusing on young players, cybercriminals don’t even bother to make deception schemes less obvious.
“They hope children and teenagers have little or no experience or knowledge of cybercriminal traps and will easily fall for even the most primitive scams.
“Therefore, parents need to be especially careful about what apps their children download, whether their devices have trusted security solutions installed and should teach their children about how to behave online.”
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