According to Odaily, a recent report by Avast reveals that social engineering dominated the landscape of cyber threats in the first quarter of 2024. The report indicates that nearly 90% of cyber attacks on mobile devices and 87% on desktop devices involved scams, phishing, and malicious advertising. These attacks often exploited human vulnerabilities more than technical ones, with a significant increase in fraudulent activities using advanced technologies such as deepfake videos and AI-manipulated audio.
These fraudulent activities frequently used hijacked YouTube channels and other social media platforms to disseminate deceptive content. The report emphasizes that these deceptive practices are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with cybercriminals leveraging high-profile events and personalities to enhance the credibility of their scams. YouTube, in particular, has become a key carrier of these threats.
Avast's telemetry data shows that over the past year, 4 million unique users were protected from threats based on YouTube, with about 500,000 users protected in the first quarter alone. Cybercriminals are increasingly exploiting YouTube's automated advertising and user-generated content features to bypass traditional security measures, deploying a range of attack methods from phishing activities to malicious software distribution.
As the focus on tech-centric crypto attacks and hacking attacks has decreased over the past year, Avast's report showcases the rise of non-technical attacks. Human vulnerabilities often present the most challenging aspect of operational security, and artificial intelligence seems to have made significant progress, posing a considerable challenge for security experts.