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Trend Micro warns of a “darkverse” of criminality, which could quickly evolve to fuel a new industry of metaverse-related cyber crimes.
The "darkverse" as imagined by Trend Micro, will resemble a metaverse version of the dark web, which would be designed to enable threat actors to coordinate and carry out illegal activities with impunity. The global cyber security company predicts that underground marketplaces operating in the darkverse would be impossible for police to infiltrate without the correct authentication tokens.
Although we don't know exactly how it will develop, according to Mick McCluney, technical director at Trend Micro, "We need to start thinking now about how it will be exploited by threat actors."
"The metaverse is a multibillion-dollar hi-tech vision that will define the next internet era.
"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 to develop on our digital doorstep," McCluney said.
There's an additional level of protection for closed criminal communities due to darkverse access being enabled for users inside a designated physical location.
The cyber-physical nature of the metaverse has the potential of opening new doors to threat actors, which could provide a haven for multiple threats to flourish according to Trend Micro research, from financial fraud and e-commerce scams to NFT theft, ransomware and more.
Trend Micro's report seeks to start an urgent dialogue about what cyber threats to expect and how they could be mitigated.
The company has outlined the top five metaverse threats as the following:
Cyber criminals might look to compromise the "digital twin" spaces run by critical infrastructure operators, for sabotage or extortion of industrial systems. There is also potential for threat actors to 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 will be commonplace much sooner.
[Related: Palo Alto Networks introduces new Unit 42 MDR service]