The 2010 Soccer World Cup is just over four months away and the organisations behind spam, scams and malicious attacks sit poised to take full advantage and cash in. Traditionally, newsworthy events (e.g. Michael Jackson’s death, Obama’s election win), or calendar dates (e.g. Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, Halloween) get a lot of attention from these organisations, and the World Cup is no exception.
Symantec, a company that monitors nefarious Internet activity, has already blocked a number of football-related websites because they contain malicious code. (See graph below).
Percentage of malicious websites relating to soccer World Cup
The final fixture announcements were made at the end of last year and we can see a noticeable spike in the threat activity. January shows a much lower level, but it is still higher than the last six months of last year. February will be interesting.
Symantec has also been tracking spam trends. In October 2009, 36 out of every 100 000 spam messages were related to football/soccer or the World Cup. In January it was 25 in 100 000. (See graph below).
World Cup/soccer Spam e-mails percentage of total
It is clear that spam is following the trend shown in the malicious code graph, and, once again, we note the numbers rising in January. 2010 NetThreat.com will be regularly updating these graphs, but you can be sure the columns will rise as the kick-off nears.