Protection Tips for the Upcoming FIFA World Cup Themed Cybercrime Malware Campaigns

With just four days until the FIFA World Cup begins, cybercriminals have already started showing their interest in taking advantage of the event, by launching targeted malicious PDFs/malware serving campaigns, blackhat SEO and fraudulent propositions, followed by lottery winning notifications/letters of claim themed scams.

Considering that, these threats and exploitation tactics are prone to intensify throughout the entire event, let’s review some of the most commonly used attack vectors, and discuss the risk mitigation strategies for each and every one of them.

The threats and the fraudulent schemes
The following list doesn’t aims to achieve conclusiveness, instead it would discuss the most prevalent threats based on the historical “performance” of malicious attackers, and scammers in general.

• Targeted malware attacks serving client-side exploits -The combination of a recently announced zero day flaw affecting Adobe’s most popular products, and the global proportions of the FIFA World Cup, clearly offer a malicious attacker the opportunity to capitalize on the event.

• 419/Lottery Scams – According to the 2009’s IC3 Internet Crime Report, advance fee fraud represented 9.8% of all complaints. The percentage is naturally much higher due to the unknown number of people that didn’t report the fraud.

• Blackhat SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaigns serving scareware – Blackhat SEO, involves the process of on purposely hijacking trending buzz story across the web, in order to capitalize on the hijacked traffic by serving client-side exploits, or most commonly scareware. There’s a common misunderstanding regarding blackhat SEO campaigns these days, with a large number of users thinking that a cybercriminal is manually monitoring these trending topics in order to hijack them.

• Spamvertised fraudulent offers, phishing attempts – According to the 2009’s IC3 Internet Crime Report, non-delivery of merchandise and/or payment represented 11.9% of all the complaints.

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