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:
- FBI Agents’ Call And Text Logs Potentially Stolen In Data Breach
January 23, 2025
The FBI has raised alarm that hackers who breached AT&T’s system last year may have stolen months of agents’ call and text logs, which could potentially lead to the identities of anonymous informants connected to investigations. While the hackers did not access the content of conversations, the stolen call log metadata—records of who called whom, when ...
- Conduent confirms outage was due to a cybersecurity incident
January 22, 2025
U.S. government contractor Conduent, which provides technology to support services such as child support and food assistance, has confirmed that a recent outage was caused by a cybersecurity incident. Conduent confirmed the disruption, which left some U.S. residents without access to support payments, to TechCrunch on Tuesday but declined to say whether the outage was related ...
- Odds & Ends: Unraveling the Surebet Playbook
January 22, 2025
The global sports betting market has seen explosive growth in recent years, fueled by the rise of online gambling platforms, increased internet access and penetration, and the legalization of betting in numerous countries. As of 2023, research showed that the global sports betting market was valued at around $92.1 billion, with projections suggesting it could ...
- ChatGPT API vulnerability could enable large-scale DDoS attacks
January 21, 2025
A security flaw in OpenAI’s ChatGPT application programming interface could be used to initiate a distributed denial-of-service attack on websites, according to a researcher. The discovery was made by Benjamin Flesch, a security researcher in Germany, who detailed the vulnerability and how it could be exploited on GitHub. According to Flesch, the flaw lies in the ...
- eCommerce data breach exposes details on half a million users
January 21, 2025
The North Pole Company, a Canadian gift basket delivery service, allegedly suffered a data breach in which half a million customers lost sensitive personal information. The claim was made on BreachForums, a popular underground community where cybercriminals come to share tools, resources, and experiences, to find partners and plan future attacks. As cybersecurity researchers from Incogni ...
- Hit by wave of cyber attacks, Japan shifts to ‘active cyber defence’
January 20, 2025
apan aims to take a more proactive approach to cyber defence by allowing hackers working for the authorities to “attack” pre-emptively to prevent or stop sabotage attempts. Under a new strategy of “active cyber defence”, Japan plans to allow hackers working for the police or Self-Defence Forces (SDF) to infiltrate servers to neutralise the source ...