Hi-Tech Thieves Target Olympics 
The main focal point of this article is on the rising of cybercrimes prior to the opening ceremony of the Olympics. According to the spokesman for Symantec, Mr. Mallom; hackers and spammers have taken this opportunity to create booby-trapps for victims. The spokesman also urge the public not be tempted to open e-mails or click on links from unknown sources eventhough it offers many gold medals or awards.
Another expert, Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro said that usually attackers would target on sites related to games as these are the places where victims can be easily attacked because visitors would catch up with the sporting event.
Security firm Marshal claims that most of these malicious and junk messages emerging from Rustock botnet ( a collection of home computers that have been hijacked by a gang of hi-tech criminals who then put it to avariety of ends) were mainly about games.
This is the part of the article that we find it to be interesting. It is the part where the article highlighted the results found by Phil Hay, the lead analyst of Marshal on how these cybercriminals behind Rustock have been so successful in their attempt to fool recipients into infecting themselves. The results came out to be the rapid improvements of their appearance and the ability in creating more and more sophisticated messages. A real life issue on how advanced and sophisticated they have been given, whereby one of the current batch had appeared as the headline stories on CNN, with the attempt to lure people to click on the headlines and were asked to install a codec in order to be able to watch the CNN video report.
From what we have read from the article, the Security company MessageLabs had found out that the cybercriminals are not only targeting on the members of the public but also to those who are part of national sporting organisations or help train athletes because these e-mails would be crafted to look like they had been written by the International Olympic Commitee. It usually attaches with fake messages which requires users to install a booby-trapped Adobe PDF in order to be able to steal their data.
The article concludes itself by giving a few precaution steps to users of Windows PCs because attackers tend to target on these users . According to the senior security consultant at Sophos; Ms Carole Thierault advised users to make sure that their anti-virus software up to date. It is also advisable to use a fiewall and install updates to Windows as soon as they becomes available. “ Of course hackers will do their best to capitalised on this event, therefore the most effective way to avoid the pitfalls os to make your device an unattractive target.” said Ms Thierault.
All in all, we find this article useful and interesting as it provides an overview on how these cybercrimes came about, how it works, who do they targeted on, and what are the steps to be taken. It basically provides us the basic or fundamental information that we should have at least get to know. We felt that the article is fairly understandable, therefore we would recommend you to read on further if you are interested.
The main focal point of this article is on the rising of cybercrimes prior to the opening ceremony of the Olympics. According to the spokesman for Symantec, Mr. Mallom; hackers and spammers have taken this opportunity to create booby-trapps for victims. The spokesman also urge the public not be tempted to open e-mails or click on links from unknown sources eventhough it offers many gold medals or awards.
Another expert, Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro said that usually attackers would target on sites related to games as these are the places where victims can be easily attacked because visitors would catch up with the sporting event.
Security firm Marshal claims that most of these malicious and junk messages emerging from Rustock botnet ( a collection of home computers that have been hijacked by a gang of hi-tech criminals who then put it to avariety of ends) were mainly about games.
This is the part of the article that we find it to be interesting. It is the part where the article highlighted the results found by Phil Hay, the lead analyst of Marshal on how these cybercriminals behind Rustock have been so successful in their attempt to fool recipients into infecting themselves. The results came out to be the rapid improvements of their appearance and the ability in creating more and more sophisticated messages. A real life issue on how advanced and sophisticated they have been given, whereby one of the current batch had appeared as the headline stories on CNN, with the attempt to lure people to click on the headlines and were asked to install a codec in order to be able to watch the CNN video report.
From what we have read from the article, the Security company MessageLabs had found out that the cybercriminals are not only targeting on the members of the public but also to those who are part of national sporting organisations or help train athletes because these e-mails would be crafted to look like they had been written by the International Olympic Commitee. It usually attaches with fake messages which requires users to install a booby-trapped Adobe PDF in order to be able to steal their data.
The article concludes itself by giving a few precaution steps to users of Windows PCs because attackers tend to target on these users . According to the senior security consultant at Sophos; Ms Carole Thierault advised users to make sure that their anti-virus software up to date. It is also advisable to use a fiewall and install updates to Windows as soon as they becomes available. “ Of course hackers will do their best to capitalised on this event, therefore the most effective way to avoid the pitfalls os to make your device an unattractive target.” said Ms Thierault.
All in all, we find this article useful and interesting as it provides an overview on how these cybercrimes came about, how it works, who do they targeted on, and what are the steps to be taken. It basically provides us the basic or fundamental information that we should have at least get to know. We felt that the article is fairly understandable, therefore we would recommend you to read on further if you are interested.
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