14 DAY TRIAL // As it always happens with important events about to kick off, scammers have already made their plans to lure victims with appealing offers related to the FIFA World Cup competition.
Symantec researchers have come across email samples containing either malicious attachments or links to web addresses that serve malware.
The incentives used in the messages range from free ticket offers (with an all-expenses paid trip to the host country, Brazil) to fake news about the football teams participating in the global event.
Obviously, to increase the chances of success, the scammers try to peak the interest of the victim with subjects about the popular players. As such, Neymar da Silva Santos and Lionel Messi are most commonly used as bait.
These emails appear to come from an official source, but grammar mistakes and a look at the source should generally reveal them as a scam.
In one email sample presented by Symantec, the cybercrook informed the victim of winning a ticket (available as an attachment) to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil as part of a promotional offer.
The offer is very alluring, especially since the message informs that the ticket provides paid trips for four persons, with 4-star accommodation included. If alarm bells aren’t ringing yet, “walking down the players’ tunnel” and “close-up view of the players warming up” should do the job.
Attachments are malicious and consist of archived executables of remote administration tools (RATs) that allow the attacker to perform tasks on the computer unbeknownst to the user, such as stealing credentials and sensitive information or making it part of a botnet that is generally used in distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS).
According to the Symantec post, the email can also contain “a malicious word document that exploits a known vulnerability in Microsoft Word.”
Users are advised not to access the links in emails with messages claiming to offer free tickets to the games or promising interesting videos or surveys of any nature.
Such deceiving practices are currently at the beginning, but other attack vectors are very likely to be used by criminals. One method to spread malware is via social networks, where a malicious link can be distributed very fast by making it available to the entire list of friends, who, in turn, can pass it on to their buddies.
Fake Android apps have also been created, some of them with the purpose of making the user access the ads, others requesting information that has nothing to do with its functionality.
By accessing official sources for live streaming of the matches or the latest news, users ensure their safety and the failure of the scammers.
Also, updating the system with the latest security patches, as well as web browsers and other applications, makes the user less vulnerable to fraudulent actions.