Scammers Using Pop Culture Trends to Lure Victims

According to a new report, online tracking is becoming more common than most people realise, and scammers are using pop culture trends to lure victims. According to the Norton Consumer Cyber Safety Pulse Report, web trackers have access to around 80% of a user's browsing history.

According to the report, customers are tracked by many different businesses as soon as they go online, and trackers collect significantly more of our digital lives than previously disclosed, including sensitive information about people.

The Norton Labs also revealed that half of the tracking organisations encountered by a user during a typical week of browsing collect this data within the first two hours of browsing. According to the survey, even if users clean their browser history every day, it would only take an average of two hours to re-encounter half of all internet trackers.  

Between October and December 2021, Norton technology in India stopped 18,796,678 cyber threats, an average of 204,311 per day. "While it's common knowledge that web trackers follow us around the internet," says Darren Shou, head of technology at NortonLifeLock, "our online privacy researchers were surprised to find that some online trackers know up to 80% of a user's browsing history."

Globally, in 2021 Norton technology blocked

• 3.6 billion cyberthreats worldwide – nearly 10 million blocks per day.

• 53.9 million phishing attempts

• 221 million file threats

• 1.4 million mobile threats

• 253,063 ransomware attacks