The Asia Tech Podcast learned a lot from Mary Jo Schrade, Assistant General Counsel, Regional Lead, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit Asia.  Mary Jo oversees the initiatives, programs, and strategies related to Microsoft Asia’s efforts to prevent or disrupt organized cybercrime and online tech support scams through public-private partnerships, coordinated enforcement, and customer engagements relating to cybersecurity and Microsoft's digital trust commitment to its customers.

Some of the topics that Mary Jo and I discussed included:

• The digital security landscape and the trends in Asia
• Statistics on the sophistication and complexity of recent cyberattacks
• The nature of tech support scams and the impact on individuals and companies
• The impact of COVID-19 on the number and scope of cyberattacks in the past 12 months
• What consumers can do to protect themselves from any kind of cyber attack, digital security breach, and scams in general
• Microsoft's strategy to combat scams
• The role that governments play in this space
• The importance of collaboration between companies and governments to tackle such scams

Read more about such scams from Mary Jo's blogpost and check out the full Microsoft 2021 Global Tech Support Scams Research Report