Football season is definitely upon us as football fanatics worldwide are all set to cheer for their teams and to proudly display their colours. Even the players are intensifying their training and solidifying their strategies.
With just days left before the highly anticipated opening of the “F'ed'eration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) 2010 World Cup,” the world can expect that even cyber-criminals will step up their game.
Cyber-criminals have long been leveraging sports events for their profiteering schemes. The list of such attacks include those related to the 2008 European Soccer Championships, the Pacquiao-Clottey boxing match the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, and the upcoming 2012 London Olympics; spam which made the inbox rounds four years before the actual event is even set to take place.
Riding on the popularity of sports events is a tried-and-tested technique that cyber-criminals continue to use even now. The 2010 FIFA World Cup is no exception. In January 2009, an early 2010 FIFA spam tried to trick recipients into believing they won an online sweepstakes draw. More recently, TrendLabs engineers encountered two separate spam runs leveraging the upcoming 2010 FIFA World Cup.
The first spam sample instructed users to open and view a .DOC file attachment to learn more about the supposed FIFA-organised “Final Draw” contest's prizes. The second spam sample arrived with a .PDF file attachment, a poorly worded letter asking the recipients to divulge specific information in relation to a supposed fund transfer transaction worth US$10.5 million.
Laws of the spamming game
Over the years, spammers have been refining their techniques and have been resorting to a variety of social engineering tactics in order to trick users into clicking malicious links or into downloading malicious files.
The most popular spamming techniques include sending out medical or pharmaceutical ads, holiday-related messages, bogus e-mail notifications, and messages leveraging timely newsworthy events. Despite ever-evolving tactics, however, spammed messages exist for one reason alone, that is, to further cyber-criminals' malicious schemes. The arrival of spammed messages in users' inboxes alongside legitimate e-mail messages increases the probability that the recipients would open even the malicious mail. Furthermore, the varying techniques spammers use to create malicious messages is an added challenge to users and security experts alike when classifying messages.
Trend Micro Smart Protection Network infrastructure delivers security that is smarter than conventional approaches. Leveraged across Trend Micro's solutions and services, Smart Protection Network combines unique in-the-cloud reputation technologies with patent-pending threat correlation technology to immediately and automatically protect your information wherever you connect. In this attack, Smart Protection Network's e-mail reputation technology blocks all e-mails related to the spam runs.
SecureData Security, part of JSE-listed SecureData Holdings, is the sole sub-Saharan distributor for Trend Micro.
For further information, please contact Lee Bristow at tel. +27 11 790 2500; fax +27 11 790 2599; e-mail leeb@securedata.co.za.
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Trend Micro
Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in Internet content security, focuses on securing the exchange of digital information for businesses and consumers. A pioneer and industry vanguard, Trend Micro is advancing integrated threat management technology to protect operational continuity, personal information, and property from malware, spam, data leaks and the latest Web threats. Trend Micro's flexible solutions, available in multiple form factors, are supported 24/7 by threat intelligence experts around the globe. Many of these solutions are powered by the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, a next-generation cloud-client content security infrastructure designed to protect customers from Web threats.
SecureData
SecureData is a specialist, value-added distributor of perimeter, application, network, endpoint, storage and identity information security solutions and risk management solutions for the African sub-continent and Indian Ocean islands. A cross-section of the available solutions from SecureData illustrates wide coverage of the following information security and risk management domains: business continuity, security appliances and devices, hardware authentication, identity and access management, security and vulnerability management, secure content management, threat management and security services.
SecureData's information security and risk management solutions include best-of-breed solutions, devices and appliances for the perimeter, data centres, applications, network, endpoints, messaging and Web. In addition, as a value-add to vendor, channel and customer, SecureData also provides a full complement of support, pre-sales and professional services around the solutions positioned in each discrete security vertical.
For more information, visit SecureData at http://www.securedata.co.za.
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