INTERVIEW: Kaspersky says phone fraud to fall in 3 years

MOSCOW, Aug 17 (PRIME) -- Phone fraud in Russia will reach a plateau in a year or two and then, thanks to the measures taken by the regulator and the law enforcers, will start decreasing, antivirus software maker Kaspersky’s chief cybersecurity expert Sergei Golovanov told PRIME in an interview published on Tuesday.

“Now we see growth, but it cannot last forever. I think that in a year or two the fraud will reach a plateau. And then we’ll see fluctuations around the plateau,” Golovanov said.

According to Kaspersky, about 70% of calls from unknown numbers are spam, and 6.2% are potential fraudsters. Golovanov said that the government has a deadline to eradicate phone scams in one to two years.

The central bank said in early July that the share of social engineering in phone fraud fell to 56.2% in January–March from 64%, but the amount of stolen money jumped by 60%.

The expert also said that perpetrators are always more active ahead of long days-off, mainly in May and December, and they are in hibernation at present.

Golovanov said the number of hacker attacks on the automated teller machines in the country has been declining steadily. Such attacks peaked in 2015, “it was a nightmare then”, and were almost absent in 2020 because fraudsters were also under the lockdown.

The number of online attacks related to the coronavirus pandemic plunged by hundreds of times. In 2020, Russians stayed at home and surfed the Web actively, while the perpetrators reacted to the government’s promises to pay compensations and subsidies and created special websites actively.

“This year these topics are of no relevance and it makes no sense to create websites for them,” the expert said.

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