Swiss cybercrime nearly doubles in six months

Reports of cyber fraud have doubled in Switzerland, the Federal Office for Cybersecurity (FOC) said. There were 30,331 reports of cyber incidents in the last six months of 2023 compared to 16,951 in the same period in 2022. The majority of scams for individual citizens were fraudulent job offers and alleged calls from the police. Companies were mainly subject to fraudsters posing as their CEO and invoice manipulation. 

Phishing reports almost doubled from 2,179 to 5,536. The FOC pointed to chain phishing - once a scammer hacked one email account, they then sent phishing emails to all the stored email accounts from the hacked address. 

Ransomware attacks on companies were on a slight decline. 

The FOC noted that the use of AI was still a very small percentage of overall cyber fraud attempts. AI scams included blackmail with AI-generated images of the fraud victim performing sex acts. Scammers also used AI to fake celebrity voices. However, the FOC believes fraudsters are exploring more applications of AI for future scams.

As cybercrime increases year on year the FOC has changed their strategy and is focused on four areas:

• Making cyber threats understandable
• Providing means to prevent attacks
• Reducing losses
• Improving the security of digital products and services.

What can your company do?

The FOC’s advice can serve as a guideline:

• Train your staff so they understand the threat and know how to avoid becoming a victim, particularly for phishing attacks
• Keep your malware systems up to date
• Have backups and train your staff with an “in the event of a breach” protocol

Cybercrime is all but an inevitability now. And with the advent of AI, it is sure to evolve and become harder to prevent. Therefore, it’s more important than ever that you and your company are primed to prevent a breach.