Microsoft issues metaverse warning for millions of users over ‘identity THEFT’ – and scammers posing as loved ones

IN A WORLD where users can be anyone, few are choosing to be themselves.

The metaverse could become a minefield of scams and traps where impersonation is hard to detect.

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Metaverse enthusiasts tout its extreme freedom – ungovernability is a point of pride.

But developers are sweating the possibilities of letting a second reality go without guard rails.

Charlie Bell, who holds the lengthy title of Executive Vice President, Security, Compliance, Identity and Management at Microsoft, shared a post highlighting security risks in the metaverse – and the results are haunting.

“In the metaverse, fraud and phishing attacks targeting your identity could come from a familiar face – literally – like an avatar who impersonates your coworker,” Bell wrote.

People today still struggle to identify scams on technology they are familiar with – the metaverse is new to nearly everyone.

Even a savvy tech user could fall into a well-designed trap enabled by the lax policies of the metaverse.

“We have one chance at the start of this era to establish specific, core security principles that foster trust and peace of mind for metaverse experiences,” Bell said in the post.

It does not read as a slight, but Bell’s statement touches on an issue that plagued Facebook: building the security protocol plane as it screams down the runway.

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Fitting an entity like the metaverse with a security system after millions have logged on could be a technical and regulatory nightmare.

The post also noted that iron-clad security is essential to the viability of the metaverse – without it, investors could be face to face with an $800billion dollar meta-failure.

Creating extra layers of protection like multi-factor authentication will be at the top of security developers list.

Meta and Microsoft, two of the leading competitors in metaverse projects, are on opposite stock price trajectories.

In the last year, Mark Zuckerberg’s company is down over 20 percent despite the rebrand, while Microsoft is up 32 percent.

This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk