TECHNOLOGY AND AI
“ The metaverse will play a large role in the next era of connectivity and will bring with it a range of security threats ”
LEWIS DUKE SALES ENGINEER AT TREND MICRO
Although we don ’ t know exactly how it will develop , we need to start thinking now about how it will be exploited by threat actors . Given the high costs and jurisdictional challenges , law enforcement will struggle to police the metaverse in general in its early years . The security community must step in now or risk a new Wild West developing on our digital doorstep .”
The dawn of the darkverse Trend Micro predicts the darkverse will resemble a metaverse version of the dark web , enabling threat actors to coordinate and carry out illegal activities with impunity . It says underground marketplaces operating in the darkverse would be impossible for police to infiltrate without the correct authentication tokens . Users can only access a darkverse world if they ’ re inside a designated physical location , meaning that there ’ s an additional level of protection for closed criminal communities . This could provide a haven for multiple threats to flourish — from financial fraud and ecommerce scams to NFT theft , ransomware and more .
The cyber-physical nature of the metaverse will also open new doors to threat actors . Trent Micro predicts that cybercriminals might look to compromise the ‘ digital twin ’ spaces run by critical infrastructure operators for sabotage or extortion of industrial systems . Or they could deploy malware to metaverse users ’ full-body actuator suits to cause physical harm . Assault of avatars has already been reported on several occasions .
Although a fully-fledged metaverse is still some years away , metaverse-like spaces could become commonplace much sooner . Trend Micro ’ s report seeks to start an urgent dialogue about what cyber threats to expect and how they could be mitigated .
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