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March Madness Tournament Leads to Malware

In the wake of March Madness Competition, from March 16 to April 5, 2010, scores of employees are live streaming games, which can further slow down the functioning of corporate systems and then make them vulnerable to malware, said ScanSafe, a security firm.

Product management director of ScanSafe, Spencer Parker said that while using infected sites to download content, employees are certainly leaving their firm at risk of data theft, as per the news published by Business Journal ON March 15, 2010.

Experts explained that the malicious sites entice users to download and install the malicious software and rather distribute trojans or install data stealing malware and key loggers.

Furthermore, in the initial phases of the competition, most employees play games during peak business operations, i.e. early and late, thereby putting their organizations at high risk.

As the field is popular in the workplace, the threat is typically dangerous, said experts. They also believe that cyber miscreants might target businesses for their attacks as employees watch games and highlights at their work stations.

Web security professionals hence commented that in a bid to earn maximum, cyber crooks are always eager to misuse latest events. Two of the most prolific and stable attack vectors employed by e-criminals to infect or compromise systems and data are greed and entertainment.

Cyber felons have also misused the earthquakes that occurred in Chile and Haiti along with Winter Olympics before March Madness to spread malware. In 2009 as well, two malware scams related to March Madness were discovered by Websense, an online security firm. One of them was SEO scam which infected search terms pertaining to basketball and then pushed these terms to top in the Google. In another scam, URLs were posted in the blog comments, which redirected users to a fake website that scans anti-virus.

Hence, experts strongly advise that users must not click on links or download from any website which is hard to recognize. Besides, experts also recommend users to install trustworthy antivirus solutions. They must also remember that their spam filter, firewall and anti malware software must be updated at regular intervals with suspicious file signatures/applications and latest virus definitions.

Related article: March Witnessed Sharp Rise in Spam

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