Dubai Security officials are bracing for an onslaught of cyber assaults as hackers hope to win big at the London Olympics.
“The cyber bad guys are expected to be prowling for your data through a method called search engine poisoning, in which they manipulate search engines to display results that take you to malicious sites,” said Alex Kirk, a senior researcher with Sourcefire Inc.
He said any major event is a golden opportunity for cybercriminals.
Security experts said that hackers are exploiting the demand for tickets, information and mobile applications to lead you into some bad places.
There are a lot of bad links in the wild and they are out there to steal your data.
Since the 2008 Olympics, UK officials have warned that the events would be a magnet to hackers and that they expected an unprecedented level of attacks.
A staggering 12 million cyberattacks were reported per day during the 2008 Beijing Olympics and experts believe that threat landscape will be much bigger this year.
London organisers are spending about $750 million on technology alone, roughly a quarter of its $3.1 billion budget.
Atos, which is responsible for about 11,500 computers and servers across Britain, will monitor possible cyber threats second by second from its Olympic Technology Operations Centre in east London’s Canary Wharf business district.
It is protecting the systems that will deliver results to scoreboards at Olympic venues, event timetables to athletes, and Olympic accreditation information to UK border officials.
“The Olympics is particularly vulnerable because it will be the most technologically interconnected, social media-driven event yet and from hacker’s perspective, this is the mother of all opportunities,” said Larry Ponemon, president of the Ponemon Institute, an internet think tank.
There are lots of people using the internet compared to four years ago and especially through their mobile phones.
The threats could range from hackers trying to put up a message on a scoreboard to more nefarious attempts to disrupt the games by knocking out London’s electricity grid.
Hackers are increasingly looking to search engines, as opposed to sending infected emails or creating tainted porn sites, according to a study by Blue Coat, a Web security provider.
“Where do attacks begin,” asked Chris Larsen, chief malware researcher at Blue Coat. “Forty per cent of the time it was a search engine optimisation. That’s way bigger than getting hit through porn or email.”
In what’s called “drive-by downloads,” cyber criminals link software to seemingly authentic websites that automatically begins downloading malware when you click onto it.
At other times, the seemingly authentic website will then direct you to another site that is infected, for example, with keystroke logging malware that captures and records your strokes. You may not even know you’ve been hacked until you notice days later that money is missing from your bank account because your account number and passwords were stolen.
Be careful though of the URLs. A recent phishing attack called for users to go to a Facebook site, which looked like the real thing, but the URL spelled “Facebook” as “Faceboook.”
“It’s a huge event that includes every country in the world and tens of thousands of athletes who will be tweeting and on Facebook and other social-media websites,“ Kirk said.
