Elon Musk and the pandemic are partly to blame.
Hello. Are you looking for a part-time job to supplement your income? Or perhaps you're sick to the back teeth of spam messages formatted exactly like this one? After living through an era of relative peace and quiet—at least as far as our inboxes were concerned—filth has begun to bubble up from the sewers and run openly through our communication channels again.
It's important not to mistake the crude language and laughable hail marys of spam emails for the work of bedroom chancers. Companies like Honan's are up against organised criminal gangs, who get involved in cybercrime because of the low risk of prosecution when targeting foreign nationals. A few weeks ago, Europol took down iSpoof, a website through which fraudsters impersonated trusted mobile contacts and are estimated to have stolen more than £100 million. The operation resulted in 142 arrests—an indication of the scale of the threat.You can blame Elon Musk for some of the noise, too. The tech baron's very loud takeover of Twitter has resulted in a well publicised, which in turn is likely to have attracted criminals hoping to exploit new vulnerabilities.
"If your password is phished, or that gaming platform is compromised, the password you use for that site will be used by the criminals to try and get into all your other gaming platforms as well," Honan warns."My message would be, just because you're on a gaming platform, don't assume there's nothing of value in it. Firstly, there's your personal information and all your contacts. And potentially, what you've built up over the years can become valuable.