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The Top Security Concerns That Should Make You Nervous About The Metaverse Blockchain

source-logo  cryptonews.net 26 August 2022 08:35, UTC
Anirban Roy

Metaverse, the thriving buzzword in the technology space, intends to bring together a virtual replica of the universe, which is asserted to be more personal, engaging, and interactive than all the available internet offerings. The metaverse would let you play games, visit stores, buy or sell properties, work somewhere, build communities, have an education, have pets, and bring everything else together by erasing the geographical barriers by combining the real world with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). 

Creating such a sensational new universe on the internet thrills consumers and enterprises. Global Industry Analysts, a market research company, claim the global metaverse market will reach a business volume worth $758.6 billion by 2026. Global technology biggies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Roblox, Unity Software, Tencent, Fastly, and Meta are all gearing up to transform their entire business as metaverse-ready by reorganizing their products and job descriptions.

Despite these significant investments, the metaverse's growth has remained invisible to the average investor. Apart from tens and hundreds of rug-pull projects, many promising metaverse projects are struggling to keep their initial exhilaration and crypto offering prices. Big metaverse projects like Sandbox and Decentraland are experiencing a massive plunge in land price valuations. Reports suggest the metaverse volumes representing the virtual land sales volume have declined from $1 billion to $157 million in the past eight months (November 2021–August 2022). However, McKinsey believes the metaverse will become a $5 trillion economy by 2030.

The perpetual growth of the metaverse doesn’t ensure the space will be a safer alternative to the real world. The metaverse could instead manifold our real-world concerns such as bullying, abuse, misinformation, polarization, radicalization, etc.

The real-world challenges for the metaverse

  • Ransomware could turn into an everyday nightmare

The threat actors have not overlooked the growing popularity of the metaverse. Modern hackers are getting more organized and sophisticated to strengthen their cartels. Moreover, with the increasing contribution of online forums and different illegal activities offered as a service, the budding actors will be more lethal than ever before. Including IoT, VR, crypto, and NFT in the metaverse would ignite the interest of criminal hackers to launch more frequent ransomware attacks. To avoid the vexing ransomware attackers, businesses should plug every tiny hole in their network.

  • Social engineering attacks could be manifold

Social engineering attacks such as phishing take advantage of several psychological aspects such as trust, greed, and panic to trick target victims into giving away essential information. With the increasing technological advancements, social engineering attacks will become manifold in the coming years as adversaries will easily impersonate brands and authorities using deep fake and other imminent technologies to infiltrate the metaverse. And the impending growth of e-commerce technologies in the metaverse could draw the attention of cybercriminals to attack more users and multiply their vaults.

  • The breeding ground of disinformation

The immersive impact of the metaverse, even after a user logs out of the virtual space, could be a concern for society if not strictly regulated. Authorities and governments could use the metaverse heavily to spread misinformation and disinformation to achieve their propaganda, which might negatively impact the users. Hate mongers could easily masquerade as authentic news publishers to spew misinformation around the metaverse, which could harm society. The moderators of private-only areas in different metaverses would find it extremely difficult to curb the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories on politics, health, and other financial and sociological aspects that impact society.

  • Turn us into voracious ad-consumers

There is no free lunch in the internet world, and the metaverse won’t become an exception either. Large enterprises are investing heavily in the metaverse to increase more personalized branding and marketing activities to up the ante of their upcoming products. The metaverse publishers would effectively control all aspects of their spaces and collect specific user data to make more money. But, of course, the data would be hosted by the users. Still, the open-source metaverse would also help enterprises to compose user-specific advertisements, which would be hard to ignore and thus create a consumer craving to have more than their actual requirements.

  • Bullying and related slurs

The overindulgence of the internet in our everyday life has multiplied different sorts of bullying. And in the metaverse, it would be far more concerning for the lifelike experience: humiliations, racial slurs, abuse, and even molestations and rapes. Nina Jane Patel, co-founder, and VP of Research of Meta, shared a trauma she experienced in Meta’s Horizon Venues months back. Through a blog post, she explained how she got verbally and sexually assaulted by three men minutes after joining the venue. The three male avatars gang raped her avatars and took photos. She expressed her trauma by adding, "My physiological and psychological response was as though it happened in reality."

Such problems are expected to surge further if the metaverse companies don’t address such grave concerns to intercept criminal activities and protect their users. Implying strict regulation defining appropriate policing and punishments for such criminal offenses would help curb these menaces, but who will take the responsibility? The question is yet to be answered.

The adaptation

Even though large consumer enterprises consider it a significant marketplace for their future marketing activities, the metaverse concept is still primarily focused on the gaming industry to become successful. However, most serious gamers prefer old-school consoles instead of the VR gaming experience. Legendary serious gaming titles such as God of War, Grand Theft Auto, FIFA, Call of Duty, DOTA, Mortal Combat, Halo, etc., have little space for NFTs and VR to offer a tremendous experience that could create the desired craving for metaverse gaming among the hardcore.

Once the initial intrusiveness fades away, gamers might consider the metaverse an occasional gaming experience rather than viewing it as a valid substitute for the real world. And the constant plunge in virtual land prices and demand across markets could be a vital indication of this trend.

Final Words

The Metaverse has the immense potential to transform the everyday internet into a new universe. It also has a lot to offer to consumers and enterprises. But to keep the space a safe, trusted location like the real world, the metaverse companies, and the participator industries should address the rousing concerns. Alongside, the governments of different nations should also create and maintain strict regulations to discourage the prevalence of cybercrime in this virtual world. The regulations should address data accountability and protection; create cyber threat awareness; strict guidelines to develop a rate mechanism for age-appropriate content; malware and related threat protection, and regular content audits.