Hong Kong · South Korea · Cambodia · Laos · The Register
Cyber offenses now account for around a third of all crime across Asia and South Pacific
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Latest Interpol review shows how scams continue to dominate, and AI-enabled attackers prove too hot to handle for cash-strapped regions.
Key facts
- The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes crime rates by type across England and Wales each year, and while computer misuse offenses in 2025 decreased by 58 percent compared to 2017’s
- In February 2024, an employee at a multinational business in Hong Kong was duped into authorizing a $25 million payment because the faces of company execs were convincingly deepfaked on a video call
- A similar case was also reported in Singapore in March 2025, when a finance director at a different multinational was tricked into transferring more than $499 million following a Zoom call
- More than 135,000 ransomware attacks were recorded in 2024, and ransomware was also deployed in 51 percent of all data breach cases
Summary
Cybercrime now accounts for more than 30 percent of all offenses across the Asia and South Pacific (ASP) region, according to the latest figures from Interpol. The international cop shop said on Wednesday that the region has seen “a dramatic increase” in the number of recorded cybercrimes, driven largely by an uptake of digital infrastructure, new technologies, and the increasingly organized nature of criminal networks. Interpol’s latest ASP Cyberthreat Assessment Report states that online scams and phishing attacks dominate cybercrime in the region. Targeted spear phishing is more common nowadays, and the growing use of AI helps even low-skilled script kiddies to apply a layer of authenticity to their attacks.