FIFA World Cup abused -- VirusBuster's spam lab reports

Along with hundreds of millions of soccer fans on all continents, the FIFA World Cup has also close followers from the dark side. Cybercriminals abuse the interest in the event by sending tons of messages with malicious load, VirusBuster warns.

Every day, VirusBuster's spam lab of analyses and categorizes tens of thousands of e-mail messages captured by the company's users, partners and spam traps, Now, worried by the catch of the last few days, the Hungary-based specialist of information security has decided to go public with its findings.

"As it could be expected, malcreants have set out to ride the enormous wave of interest in the soccer world cup. We have detected a scary, and growing, number of spam messages, which use fake FIFA-related news to entice users into opening some kind of attachment. In most cases, the attached file contains malware", says Szilárd Stange, VirusBuster's product manager for technology.

The messages come in English. A typical text, for example, runs like this: "FIFA World Cup 2010 scandal news, read attached document." Users who rush to click on the file, however, will be probably bitterly disappointed. Rather than some juicy scandal report, they will see malware getting installed on their machine.

"Never open such messages. Trash them immediately", VirusBuster's Stange suggests. But that's not the end of his expert advice. "Beware: it's not only spam that cybercriminals use to take dark advantage of the FIFA World Cup. They have also set up many malicious websites for the occasion. Therefore, browse the web with special care, and remember to use up-to-date antivirus software", he adds.