Cyberattacks From Fake Social Media Accounts Surged 43% In Q1 Globally - Report

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 13th July, 2021) The number of cyberattacks using fake social media accounts has increased by 43% globally in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the last quarter of the previous year, according to a June report by the antivirus software company McAfee.

"New Fake Social Network Account vectors increased 43% from Q4 2020 to Q1 2021," the report said.

Additionally, the report stated that the number of targeted attacks rose 28%. At the same time, there was a significant drop in such areas, as vulnerabilities (-153%), account hijacking (-98%) and malicious script (-79%).

In the Q1, the volume of malware threats observed by McAfee experts has also increased 3% compared to Q4, with an average of 688 threats per minute, the report added.

According to the company, Russia showed the highest level of threat detection among top-20 countries, while the US became the leader in terms of query volume with 775 billion requests from American clients.

"Of the 55 billion GTI [McAfee Global Threat Intelligence] queries in Russia, malware was detected 13.38% of the time, resulting in Russian customers experiencing the highest detection rate of malware among the top 20 countries," the report stated.

Another cyber powerhouse, China, showed a low detection rate of 1.26%, but the second highest query volume of 199 billion.