Crossroads Asia | Security | Central Asia

As Cybercrime Soars in Central Asia, Digital Literacy Lags Behind

There’s no easy solution, but the most obvious first step is to empower individuals to think critically about what they read online.

More than half of the crimes registered in the city of Tashkent in 2025 were cybercrimes, according to the Tashkent City Prosecutor’s Office. With the expansion of digital services and financial transactions conducted online, criminals are following the money. 

The Uzbek government knows this is a problem, but its missing the simplest solution: digital literacy.

Last year, Uzbekistan’s Interior Ministry’s Cybercrime Center told Gazeta.uz that theft and fraud involving bank cards are the most common crimes, including phishing and a variety of clever scams that convince individuals to surrender their banking details to criminals.

Uzbekistan’s population is young – with some 60 percent of the population under the age of 30 – and youth are presumed to be technologically adept. But given the skyrocketing rates of cybercrimes, it’s clear that digital literacy is lagging behind the threat.

Digital literacy skills are crucial in combatting cybercrimes. In the context of Indonesia, a group of scholars concluded that “low digital literacy contributes to the increasing vulnerability of individuals and organizations to cyber attacks.” These attacks include web defacement, stealer malware and ransomware, AI-based cyber threats, phishing, and more.

“Digital security is not only the responsibility of the government,” the scholars wrote, “but the public must also take part in protecting their data by being well-literate.”

Digital literacy is the ability to responsibly find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content online; it shares obvious attributes with other forms of literacy, such as media literacy, especially when it comes to evaluating online information like a post on social media advertising a well-paying job abroad. 

One survey-based study of youth and digital technology in Central Asia, which examined how youth use digital technology, made a clear link between media and digital literacy.

“Media and digital literacy — the capacity to locate, verify, and thoughtfully engage with online content — has become essential in an era marked by misinformation, algorithm-driven echo chambers, and information overload,” Farrukh Irnazarov wrote in a paper published last August by the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute Silk Road Studies Program. Irnazarov identified a gap between stated values and actual behaviors, noting “youth overwhelmingly express a commitment to accuracy and factchecking, yet their actual behaviors often fall short of these ideals.” 

And this has implications for cybersecurity: “Cybersecurity awareness remains low: personal data, including bank details, is often shared freely both online and offline.”

In an era defined by the instant gratification of endless scrolling on platforms like TikTok, and suffused with get-rich-quick schemes and clever tactics to get around regulations and get ahead, it is of little surprise that checking the facts........

© The Diplomat