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:
- Ukrainians are using VPNs to cause havoc in Russia by changing fuel station statuses on maps in a bid to cause chaos and confusion
July 11, 2026
A coordinated online campaign has reportedly encouraged users to alter fuel station information on digital maps across Russia, creating confusion among drivers. The activity involves changing station statuses by marking locations with available fuel as empty or showing closed stations as operational. Supporters of the campaign claim the effort is designed to disrupt travel decisions, increase uncertainty, ...
- Supermarket chain Lidl warns customers after data leak
July 10, 2026
Unknown individuals managed to gain access to customer data held by the supermarket chain Lidl. The German company informed affected customers of this via email this week. Thus far, the supermarket chain has declined to say how many customers were affected. However, the discount retailer did state that it has notified the Dutch Data Protection Authority. Read ...
- No Manners Here: The Ruthless Rise of The Gentlemen Ransomware
July 10, 2026
The Gentlemen (aka Storm-2697) is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) program active since at least July 2025. Public reporting indicates that the operators were likely active months earlier as an affiliate (known as ArmCorp) of Qilin RaaS, which Unit 42 tracks as Spikey Scorpius. Their ransomware variants are written in both C and Go programming languages, enabling ...
- Florida ransomware negotiator convicted for helping ransomware gang extort US companies
July 10, 2026
Florida man Angelo Martino has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for conspiring with hackers to deploy ransomware during his job as a ransomware negotiator for a U.S. cybersecurity company. The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the sentence on Thursday, noting that the government seized more than $10 million worth of cryptocurrency and assets. Martino ...
- Accenture confirms breach after hacker steals 35GB of source code and other data
July 9, 2026
Accenture has confirmed suffering a cyberattack, days after threat actors started selling an archive allegedly coming from the firm. “We are aware of this isolated matter, and we have remediated its source. There is no impact to Accenture operations and service delivery,” Accenture said in a statement. It follows a relatively unknown threat actor called 888 posting ...
- An unnamed US county paid $1M extortion demand to cybercriminals
July 9, 2026
A US county reportedly paid $1 million to Kairos, an extortion gang that claimed to have stolen more than 2 TB of data, but the county never received independently verifiable proof that the stolen files had been deleted – just the criminals’ promise. This means the county’s stolen files may turn up for sale on a ...