Phishing targets kids via fake gaming sites

Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky warned against phishing scams disguised as popular digital games—including Minecraft and Roblox— targeting three- to 16-year-old gamers, raising the need to educate them about online safety measures.

In its report titled “The Dark Side of Kids’ Virtual Gaming Worlds,” Kaspersky noted that the volume of digital threats on online gaming launched against young gamers had surged by 57 percent to more than 7 million last year from 4.5 million in 2021.

The cybercriminals are doing so by creating fake webpages mimicking globally recognized games, which lures children into downloading malicious files.

“Since children of this age often do not have their own computers and play from their parents’ devices, the threats spread by cybercriminals are most likely aimed at obtaining credit card data and credentials of the parents,” Kaspersky explained.

The majority or 55.8 percent of the digital attacks were in the form of fake Minecraft software. This was followed by Roblox (15.4 percent), Among Us (10.9 percent), Poppy Playtime (4.4 percent), Brawl Stars (3.8 percent), Toca Life World (3.2 percent), Fortnite (3 percent) and Valorant (2.8 percent).

Kaspersky noted that half of Roblox’s 60 million users were 13 years old and younger, stressing that the “majority of victims of these cybercriminals’ attacks are potentially children who lack knowledge of cybersecurity.”

One of the common ways by which cybercriminals are luring young players is creating a page or a software embedded with popular cheats for the games. They even trick the gamers into disabling antivirus features of the devices so the digital attacks will avoid detection.

“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,” Kaspersky security expert Vasily Kolesnikov said.

As such, Kolesnikov advised parents 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.”

The cybersecurity firm also suggested that parents be more mindful of the online habits of their children so they could protect them from the cyberattacks.

“Spend more time communicating with your kids about online safety measures,” Kasperksy added.

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