This geek hates the World Cup
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Spam, Security on
There are many reasons why I hate the World Cup: it’s football (and not the proper Rugby Union kind either) and it’s totally inescapable. The media seems to assume that everyone is interested in which bunch of seriously overpaid egos can kick a ball around the least worse, so TV schedules are rejigged around the matches and newspapers stuffed full of any vaguely football related news, including the wives, girlfriends and no doubt labradoodles as well.
But perhaps the main reason I hate the World Cup right now is the sheer amount of spam and malware it has created. According to the latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report from Symantec Hosted Services, a whopping 25 percent of all global spam is currently related to the World Cup.
OK, so it is nothing new for the spammers and scammers to latch on to current events in order to peddle their murky trade, but when analysis reveals that 25 percent of spam includes keywords related to football you know things have reached a new low.
If that is not bad enough, MessageLabs Intelligence also intercepted a run of some 45 targeted malware emails earlier this month, all aimed at Brazilian companies and designed to rely on social engineering tactics and World Cup excitement to compromise corporate systems. using a dual attack mode approach, both PDF attachments and malicious links were included in order to double the chance of success: think about it, if the AV scanner removes the infected PDF attachment but then forwards the apparently cleansed message complete with a malicious link the recipient is much more likely to consider it as trusted.
“Right now, spammers are reliant on the massive wave of excitement and expectation that typically surrounds an event like the FIFA World Cup” says MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Paul Wood. “Riding this wave, spammers get the attention of their victims by offering products for sale or enticing them to click on a link. It is not uncommon for the event to appear in the subject line of an email but for the body of the same email to be completely unrelated”.
With England playing so badly that the team is not likely to progress much further you may have thought the fuss would die down and the spam problem go away equally quickly, however the tournament will continue with or without England and so will the opportunity to spam us. Anyway, Wimbledon tennis has started now as well, which is yet another excuse for the bad guys to grab us by the balls.
Game, set and match to the spammers it seems…
Rated: 73.33% (3 votes)
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