Beware the darkverse and its cyber-physical threats – SecurityBrief Australia

Trend Micro has released a new report warning of a darkverse of criminality hidden from law enforcement, which could quickly evolve to fuel a new industry of metaverse-related cybercrime.
The top five metaverse threats outlined in the report are:
"The metaverse is a multibillion-dollar hi-tech vision that will define the next internet era," says Mick McCluney, technical director at Trend Micro.
"Although we don't know exactly how it will develop, we need to start thinking now about how it will be exploited by threat actors. Given the high costs and jurisdictional challenges, law enforcement will struggle to police the metaverse in general in its early years," he says. 
"The security community must step in now or risk a new Wild West to develop on our digital doorstep."
As imagined by Trend Micro, the darkverse will resemble a metaverse version of the dark web, enabling threat actors to coordinate and carry out illegal activities with impunity. 
Underground marketplaces operating in the darkverse would be impossible for police to infiltrate without the correct authentication tokens. Because users can only access a darkverse world if they are inside a designated physical location, theres an additional level of protection for closed criminal communities.
This could provide a haven for multiple threats to flourish, from financial fraud and e-commerce scams to NFT theft, ransomware and more. The cyber-physical nature of the metaverse will also open new doors to threat actors. 
Cybercriminals might look to compromise the digital twin spaces run by critical infrastructure operators, for sabotage or extortion of industrial systems. Or they could 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. Trend Micro's report seeks to start an urgent dialogue about what cyber threats to expect and how they could be mitigated.
Questions to start asking include:

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