Centre for Cybersecurity has received more than 8.1 million reports of suspicious messages so far this year

CCB says that the reason for the increase is twofold. First of all there is an increase in the number of such messages that are being sent by criminals and secondly the CCB’s email address for the reporting of suspicious messages verdacht@safeonweb.be has become better known among members of the public.

Since January more than 8.1 million suspicious mails have been reported to Safeonweb. During the whole of 2022 Safeonweb received more than 6 million such reports. The mails contain a total of 800,000 links to mala fide website. CCB’s Miguel De Bruycker. Told VRT News that "What is striking about the figures is that the remain very high. On the one hand that shows that people have faith in us and on the other that the number of suspicious messages remains very high”. 

If you receive a suspicious message you can forward it straight away to suspicious@safeonweb.be. The Safeonweb team will then try and find out as quickly as possible whether they were sent by criminals.

"Thanks to the emails we receive we already get a good idea of the what the criminals will do that day from early in the morning. This enables us to issue warnings to companies such as Microsoft and Google so that they can intervene immediately and sure up their security programs." Miguel De Bruycker told VRT News.

The information obtained from the general public is worth its weight in gold. Without the information contained in the all the mails that people send us, people that use the internet would be much less well protected”.

Malicious websites are also filtered and reported to the internet providers. Safeonweb also works closely with police services and the judicial authorities to track down and stop criminals.

Some time ago, the Director of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium predicted that phishing would have been stamped out by the end of 2023. However, this prediction seems to be very wide of the mark.

Miguel De Bruycker admits that he was wrong. "I was mistaken. We have indeed not been successful in achieving this”. While things are moving slower than planned CCB says that it is well on its way and that an additional level of protection will rolled out in the coming month.

The fight against online scams has become more difficult in recent years. Cybercriminals use the latest technological gadgets, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), to make their messages more credible. "Texts are now often written in almost perfect Dutch with hardly any errors, while emails used to be often written in poor English. This is all become possible thanks to AI. Of course, we also AI to help us in the fight against online fraud.

AI is not the only tool used by cybercriminals to make them appear more convincing. "Due to the amount of information that can be found about people online, phishing messages also be made more personal. "Deep fake", imitating someone's voice or even someone's appearance, can make victims think that, for example, their boss is on the phone asking them to quickly arrange a payment while he/she is on holiday. On his/her return the boss discovers that the company has been robbed by one of its own employees.