The IT Nerd

The Olympics are a great display of athletic talent. But in these Olympics, spam, malware and phishing attacks are taking center stage according to Symantec:

Unfortunately, it’s exactly this goodwill that attackers are attempting to prey upon. In this month’s Symantec Intelligence Report, we take a look at how attackers are using Olympic themed hashtags on Twitter to spread malicious code, bundling threats with popular Olympic-themed Android apps, and creating spam and phishing scams that pretend to be contests sponsored by credit card companies—all in the hopes of taking advantage of the excitement surrounding the event. There has also been a few instances of spammers attempting to trick users into downloading malware. For example, one spam email we’ve recently encountered includes a link to a website that mimics YouTube.

Now there’s some other interesting facts in here as well. For example Canada’s spam rate increased slightly from last month’s 66.5% to 67.9%. Canada’s virus rate currently sits at 1 in 275 (compared to June’s 1 in 271.3). But clearly the fact that attacks are being tied to a major event is kind of disturbing. Clearly you have to on guard for these sorts of things if you want to stay safe on the Internet.

This entry was posted on August 7, 2012 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.