London Olympics offered opportunity for cyber criminals: Websense

17 Aug 2012

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Cyber security experts have often warned about the tendency of all kinds of cyber criminals to get hyper active around the time of global events like the Olympics, and the London Olympics as the experts expected, provided the perfect setting for all kinds of conmen to have a field day

Even before the Olympics got under way, shady ticket deals were being hawked on the internet and even Google's famous Adwords advertising service, one the internet giant's main soruces of income was fair game.

A BBC investigation revealed that a Google search for "olympic tickets" served up sites at the top-of-the-page that sold tickets without permission from Olympic authorities,  a criminal offense in the UK under the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006.
 
Security firm, Websense had announced in its Security Predictions for 2012, that the imminent start of the Olympic Games 2012 offered an ideal platform for phishing authors as well as malicious bots, to spread their attempts at masquerading as legitimate sites, organisations, or services to trick users into divulging information.

According to the company it had detected and tracked a significant number of these kinds of Olympic phishing messages whose goal was to trick users into divulging their personal information.
 
When the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games was exactly a week away cyber security researchers were already seeing data-stealing malware that aimed to capitalise on the Games.

Malware rode on the buzz surrounding the high profile events  to steal personal data. According to experts, Olympics-themed content armed with malware was introduced mainly through social engineering-based attacks.

The cyber criminals behind the themed attacks knew that their big chance of enticing potential victims was to leverage a current hot topic that got clicks, and the chance to spread their web of deceipt further.
 
Websense says that the Polish Computing Emerging Response Team (CERT) analysed an interesting sample of data-stealing malware, which once executed, had the ability to interact with social channels like Facebook, Skype, and Microsoft Live Messenger.

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