Major sporting events like the World Cup, Super Bowl, and Wimbledon attract millions, even billions, of viewers. Argentina’s shootout win over France in the final game of the Qatar 2022 World Cup reached a global audience of 1.5 billion viewers. And the Olympics, starting later this month in Paris, is the biggest of them all—with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics having attracted a worldwide audience of over 3 billion viewers.
These events are also prime opportunities for cybercriminals. Over the past decade, the number of cyberattacks targeting major events has surged, increasing from 212 million documented attacks at the London 2012 Games to a staggering 4.4 billion at the Tokyo 2020 Games. These attacks often have direct financial motives, such as scams, digital fraud, or the acquisition of valuable data from attendees, viewers, and sponsors.
Read more…
Source: Fortinet
Related:
- CareCloud confirms 3.7M patients had their medical records stolen in data breach
August 19, 2026
Hackers have stolen the personal information and medical records of more than 3.75 million people in a data breach at health data giant CareCloud, the company has confirmed with federal regulators. The disclosure marks the first confirmation of the scale of the data breach, which is now confirmed to be the fifth-largest theft of health ...
- ‘Proactive SIM’ cards can hijack smartphones, IoT devices and even EV chargers
August 18, 2026
A malicious SIM card can instruct the device it sits in to run commands of an attacker’s choosing, and on the cellular modules embedded in electric vehicle chargers, industrial routers, and car telematics units, essentially allowing it to take the entire device over. Researchers from the University of Birmingham and the German security firm Fuzzware demonstrated ...
- Mitigating large-scale credential attacks
August 18, 2026
Identity has effectively become the new perimeter, where cybercriminals are increasingly choosing to log in rather than break in. To accomplish this, attackers frequently gather previously leaked username and password pairs. Gathering these credentials can then allow them to pivot to password spraying against services exposed to the internet, gaining credentials for other products and ...
- Hunting MacSync Stealer infrastructure through behavioral pivots
August 18, 2026
MacSync Stealer is a macOS-focused information stealer that relies on changing infrastructure to deliver payloads, communicate with compromised devices, and exfiltrate data. Earlier reporting by RST Cloud identified the threat through a limited set of domains and documented rapid command-and-control (C2) replacement after public disclosure. Microsoft Defender Experts expanded that view by correlating recurring endpoints and network behaviors ...
- ‘Unprecedented’ number of Apple users received recent spyware alert, say investigators
August 17, 2026
An unprecedented number of Apple customers have reported receiving a recent threat notification alerting them to suspected spyware attacks targeting their devices, according to experts who investigate these types of incidents. Several people publicly and privately reported receiving Apple’s spyware alerts over the weekend, after Apple sent out a new wave of notifications on Friday alerting customers in ...
- Operation ASTERIX: Anatomy of a Crypto Fraud Pipeline
August 17, 2026
Rapid7 researchers identified an exposed web directory on infrastructure used to support a cryptocurrency fraud operation. The server contained raw phone-number datasets, account-validation tools, enriched lead records, phishing panels, voice-dialing scripts, fake wallet applications, persistence mechanisms, and Telegram exfiltration code. Among the artifacts was evidence that the operator relied on AI coding assistants throughout the ...