Spam generated by fake sporting sites can, other than taking your valuable time, steal your bank account details and credit card numbers to defraud you of your money.
Your craze for cricket, it seems, can not only rob you of your precious time but also your hard-earned money unless you are careful. Spam generated by fake sporting sites can, other than taking your valuable time, steal your bank account details and credit card numbers to defraud you of your money.
With the ICC 2011 World Cup cricket championship scheduled for February 2011, spammers are coming up with new tricks to invade your computer and hijack it for ulterior purposes. There are reports that they are working on ‘innovative’ strategies to exploit internet users, primarily by luring them to book tickets for the world cup online.
Fresh spam emails pertaining to the upcoming cricket World Cup are already doing the rounds on the Web. “Phishing sites claiming to be promoting the tournament have already surfaced,” Shantanu Ghosh, Symantec’s vice-president, India product operations, told DNA.
Once you click on the logo of the carnival on such a site and try to access cricket-related information, you automatically end up on a list of targeted phishing victims. A similar phenomenon blighted email users across the world during the FIFA World Cup.
“Phishing sites claim that users can get tickets for the matches by entering their login details. Frequently, in the hope of obtaining tickets for the cricket World Cup, people innocently give their login details to sites which are actually fraudulent phishing sites,” said Ghosh. When the logo on a phishing site is clicked, information related to the event is displayed. Below the logo are icons of the sponsors and the sports channels in India which will broadcast the tournament. The spam email says that the schedule of the matches has been finalised and tickets have been available for sale since June 1, 2010.
An eager cricket lover is likely to submit his or her email ID to the website, only to become an unwitting victim of a phishing attack.
Ghosh further said that currently, phishing sites are hosted on free web-hosting domains and the URLs contain words that indicate that the content is related to the World Cup. You may see something like this: icccricket2011.******.com (Domain name has been removed). The spammers conducted many successful phishing attacks during the FIFA Cup as well.
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
)
)
)
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}