NEWS
South Africa , Kenya and Nigeria saw millions of cyberattacks in 2020 and disturb their experiences , while users might not even know it is there .
Potentially unwanted applications ( PUAs ) are programs that are usually not considered to be malicious by themselves . However , they are generally influencing user experience in a negative way .
For instance , adware fills user device with ads ; aggressive monetising software propagates unrequested paid offers ; downloaders may download even more various applications on the device , sometimes malicious ones .
Kaspersky security solutions have reported on 28 million malware attacks in 2020 and 102 million detections of potentially unwanted programs ( pornware , adware etc .) they have accounted for by the beginning of August 2020 .
These numbers show that it ’ s not only the malware that attacks users but also the ‘ grey zone ’ programs that grow in popularity
While calculating interim results of threat landscape activity in African countries , the researchers noticed that PUAs attack users almost four times more often than traditional malware . They also eventually reach more users , for instance , while in South Africa , the malware would attack 415,000 users in seven months of 2020 , the figure for PUA would be 736,000 .
“ The reason why ‘ grey zone ’ software is growing in popularity is that it is harder to notice at first and that if the program is detected , its creators won ’ t be considered to be cybercriminals ,” said Denis Parinov , a Security Researcher at Kaspersky .
Cybercrime report reveals new opportunities and risks for EMEA in online channels
LexisNexis Risk Solutions has released its biannual Cybercrime Report , which tracks global cybercrime activity from January 2020 through June 2020 . The report dives deep into how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the global digital economy , regional economies , industries , businesses and consumer behaviour . The period has seen strong transaction volume growth compared to 2019 but an overall decline in global attack volume . This is likely linked to growth in genuine customer activity due to changing consumer habits .
Network also notes an uptick in transactions from new devices and new digital identities . We attribute this to many new-to-digital consumers moving online to procure goods and services that were no longer available in person or harder to access via a physical store , during the pandemic .
The Europe , Middle East and Africa region ( EMEA ) saw lower overall attack rates in comparison to most other global regions from January through June 2020 . This is due to a high volume of trusted login transactions across relatively mature mobile apps .
The LexisNexis Risk Solutions Cybercrime Report analyses data from more than 22.5 billion transactions processed by the LexisNexis Digital Identity Network , a 37 % growth year over year . Mobile device transactions also continue to rise , with 66 % of all transactions coming from mobile devices in the first half of 2020 , up from 20 % in early 2015 . The Digital Identity
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