Skip to navigation
   
Davey Winder's Blog

This geek hates the World Cup

By Davey Winder in Editorial

Posted in Blog, Spam, Security on June 22, 2010 at 7:33 pm

Permalink | Author Profile

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…

12345
Rated: 73.33% (3 votes)
Loading ... Loading ...

Previous Post | Next Post

 
 
Comments

Pingback by IT PRO: Blogs: Davey Winder: England World Cup defeat a blessing in disguise - June 28, 2010 on 12:59 pm

[…] I mentioned recently, 25 percent of all global spam is currently related to the World Cup and much of that will contain malicious linkage. Although I have no actual figures to shore up my […]

Trackback by Hyun Standford - February 9, 2012 on 8:02 am

greenpeace miss binibining reggae…

[…]the foundation for a lot of practices whether or not alone or like […]…

Make a comment

* required

* required

We stop spam using reCaptcha.
Type the words below and click Submit Comment.

   
Tag cloud

Video search Trojan virtual machine code broadband virtual world symantec help Addiction Nintendo Digital Footprint christmas McKinnon MSN xmas Palm Pre Gadget Kindle crime Apple App Health Psion development documentation Conference Children fake dumb XP FBI man-in-the-middle Education outsourcing printing Internet IT work Gateway Spotify tax Game meme BOFH black hat Gartner App Store support wifi economy staffing patch management Mobile Phones Backlash MessageLabs Lotus credit card fraud Recall Mafia Review Software Linux Top 500 Sony Web Development e-commerce Music museum credit crunch poll ASUS second life workplace Employment family e Kin acquisition Palm Tesco shopping productivity rootkits HPC payment server surveys CAPTCHA economics report VPN archiving Jesus Phone fun Mars betting Business Firefox HP information football The Federation Geeks sick mail cloud Psychic Networks hoax spam IP Banned Energy Facebook adware NBC hubdub Top 10 holidays Army remote working chips PS3 social networking Amazon eBook recession GMail Internet Explorer Hack Android Enterprise service Kaspersky ID Theft malware linkedin MiniBook Parenting encryption Michael Jackson snooping security Vista NASA admin Harry Potter remote prison Data Centre Cisco Eee PC Performance computing Advertising fool Military Supercomputer books nightmare Steve Jobs library innovation technology news scam parental control InfoSec Twitter compromise Sex Notebooks Project law gadgets Mobile Phone ISP GSM RATM Architecture office stupid Finjan Marketing graphics Funny Opinion desktop terrorism computers services email Research Bill Gates Study Windows Phone 7 Series survey Acer Scotland disclosure monetisation scareware transactional security China Jobs Porn iPod iPhone 3GS iPad Beta botnet Retail carbon copy Guardian SMS data management scan hacker SSL Rumour science stupidity trust privacy Paris Hilton iPhone IBM Government Browsers students green Press Election Windows 7 Steve Ballmer Obama standards Nexus iPhone 3G worm AMD Eee OCR Rant Big Brother Flash Death VeriSign Google Olympics Madness worker Google Earth Deal mobile campaign hacking patent universe money Intel theft Blog politics exploit fraud USA Meh digitise millions MSNBC ROFL Developers teleworking payments Dell EU Yahoo RAM network policy Ballmer Windows Microsoft copyright Application Blogging banking storage tech Noro earth hour home lawsuit Zango Kill Switch Netbook gaming spending hypervisor Patents data protection IDC web 2.0 Apps Programming hardware banks Battery avatar VM computing Russia Digg Browser biometrics virtualisation statistics President OS console world of warcraft YouTube global computer Voice phishing DNS Silverlight Pirate open source Europe Analysis BSI environment debian size ISPA web Media ecommerce games memory Johnny Depp Licensing smartphone Trousers migration Space Microchip virus Experiment Texas Instruments Adobe School Texting
Advertisement
Advertisement