As is the case with any high profile worldwide event, the World Cup is fuelling higher Internet traffic volume which tend to lure opportunistic spammers and hackers.
In such a situation, enterprises and consumers need to be cautious when engaging the online community and navigating the Web. In this advisory, internet security product firm Fortinet says that it will advise how users and enterprises can stay safe from malicious attempts to compromise data.
Labs research findings
Historically, hackers have attempted to hijack traffic from popular Websites, and the FIFA World Cup will be no exception. Cybercriminals have repeatedly proved their (often simple) attacks can be successful. Common social engineering attacks capitalize on events through social networking, email based spam (containing malicious links/attachments) and search engine optimization (SEO)-based attacks. SEO attacks work by getting popular search engines to rank malicious Websites among a list of the top set of returned results following a gaming related keyword search.
SEO attacks can be dangerous because they are often user-initiated, unlike many other solicited attacks seen in the wild. In addition to malware attacks, fraud is also a significant threat to be wary of. For example, FIFA issued a scam warning <http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/organisation/ticketing/authorisedticket.html> earlier this year that suggested sports fans be wary of ticket lotteries and any other communications from FIFA that ask for additional payments and/or personal information to secure tickets.
