Cyber-criminals are once again using the Olympics as an opportunity to try and infect more PCs and steal personal information.
Trend Micro pointed to more than a dozen sites on Sunday that are offering online streaming packages for sale, priced at $29.95 and $49.95 and payable with a credit card or PayPal account. The sites are almost certainly fake and designed to harvest personal information, as the International Olympic Committee has only authorized 33 major broadcasters to carry the summer games.
As with any popular news event, hackers are trying to exploit the Olympics as an opportunity to scoop up more financial credentials that could be sold on the black market. Past Olympic games have also been prey to cyber scams and attacks too. In 2008, many news Web sites covering the Olympics were hit by SQL injection attacks, re-directing users of legitimate sites to malware-invested servers.
Businesses should keep in mind that employees looking for Olympics related information or streaming at work could stumble upon these attacks. It’s one more reason to ensure a good anti-virus detection software is rolled on your PCs, and also consider monitoring and controlling in-bound and out-band traffic from office computers.