Cyber Attacks to Focus on Olympic 2008 Related Sites

There is a growing possibility that cyber criminals would aim their assaults on the approaching Olympic Games, Websense's Technical Consultant, Southeast Asia, Arun Chaudhury, said on March 4, 2008 at a Websense-hosted event, as reported by ZdNetasia on March 5, 2008.

According to the security professional, cyber attackers have been exploiting events of high profile either to earn financial profits or to entice innocent Web surfers into downloading and installing malware.

Chaudhury also added that as per Websense predictions there would be massive denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against Beijing Olympics related sites in 2008 as fraud attempts increase through the Web and e-mail, as reported by ZdNetasia.

Chaudhury further said that Websense also predicted that there would be hijacking of popular news about the Olympics and other sports Websites, which receive hourly update and millions of surfers visits them around the world. The hacking attacks are crafted to install malware on the users' systems and steal business or personal confidential information.

According to Chaudhury, Website owners wanting to mitigate threats from DDoS attacks and malicious codes must regularly apply patches to all applications even the operating system of the Web server. They must also perform assessments for vulnerability and use tools for Website integrity.

Additionally, Websense indicated in its report that various pieces of malware increased to 220,000 in 2007 from around 20,000 in 2002. In Chaudhury's estimates, nearly 80% of total threats in the present time are from the Web.

Researchers at Websense say that during the 2006 FIFA World Cup, malware authors crafted a fake Website that dropped a Trojan program onto visitor's systems. Another example of bogus sites was the disastrous Hurricane Katrina in which false donation sites designed to deceive donors online.

In similar news released in the end week of February 2008, researchers at MessageLabs drew the same conclusions on certain attacks that would focus on Beijing Olympic 2008. They found that some documents seemingly appeared from the Olympic mail servers and actually had malware embedded on them. The documents seemed so relevant that recipients forwarded them to other members of the Olympic committee without knowing they were malicious.

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» SPAMfighter News - 3/12/2008